Strengthening governance of ocean fishery resources

Governance of the world’s marine fisheries is ill-adapted to sustainability. Twenty years after the expansion of exclusive economic zones over most of the continental shelves, fisheries worldwide face problems of stock depletion, declining yields and increasing conflict. Other human activities in the ocean compound the effect. What is wrong? This paper is about the internal workings of fishery governance and their links to fishery outcomes. The theme of this paper is that there are fundamental weaknesses in the way fishery governance works that contribute to sustainability problems. Basic requirements for healthy ocean fishery governance are not being met because the scope and structure of governance are weak. Although the particular forms of weakness vary with fisheries and with geopolitical regions, the substance of the weakness is common across all regions. What we ask of fishery governance is that it coordinate institutional rules and individual actions by performing certain functions: incorporate multiple objectives representing different types of conservation and use; bring the time horizons of private individuals into line with those of the public; send signals of resource scarcity and enable effective adaptive responses; promote legitimacy by reflecting accepted norms of equity and by controlling harmful opportunism; contain both the level and distribution of transactions costs. Fishery governance is failing to adequately perform these functions as a result of the attributes of management scope and management structure. At both national and international levels, improvement of governance will rest on the adoption of a stable long-term management scope and the construction of flexible management structures. © 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.