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This chapter discusses what is meant by, and what is involved in, fisheries management. Topics covered include the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Compliance Agreement, FAO's Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries and International Plans of Action, regional fisheries management organizations, and importing environmental issues into fisheries management.

High seas fishery for cod in the Barents Sea Loophole, a piece of international waters surrounded by the EEZs of Norway and Russia is the main focus of this chapter. Throughout most of the 1990s, vessels from a number of states targeted cod in this high seas without allocated quotas by the regional management regime. This chapter explores the interplay between efforts to accommodate this straddling stock problem within the existing regional framework and the partially parallel evolvement of the United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement. In addition to the discussion of the regional regime and its adaptation to the Loophole challenge, the extent to which this specific regional dispute influenced state positions and outcomes at the New York negotiations is examined including the likely impact of the Fish Stocks Agreement on effective management of the Loophole fishery.

This chapter begins with an assessment of the situation and the significance of the Sea of Okhotsk fisheries. It addresses the unilateral measures taken by the Russian Federation regarding fisheries in the Sea of Okhotsk and the developments involving the Russian Federation and the interested states. Also, the Russian submissions concerning the regime of straddling stocks made during the Fish Stocks Conference are analysed and compared to the subsequent negotiating texts and the Fish Stocks Agreement. Further, the legal arguments of the Russian Federation are evaluated against the relevant rules of international law. The chapter concludes by identifying the linkages of the regime for fisheries in the Sea of Okhotsk to other regimes and suggests how this regime may further develop.

The use of ‘flags of convenience’ has been a common problem in international law because of the problems it poses on international navigation, application of international standards, and protection to seafarers. This chapter however, focuses on its recent manifestation on unauthorized fishing in areas of the high seas that are governed by regional fisheries conservation and management arrangements. Certain legal aspects have risen in the 1990s that offered some innovative approaches in dealing with the flags of convenience problem specifically related to the conservation and management of international fisheries. This chapter highlights two important global agreements: the 1993 FAO Compliance and the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement. This chapter also aims to provide an overview of the developments that occurred on the new methods for law enforcement and control of foreign fishing vessels at both regional and global levels to solve the flags of convenience problem.

This chapter examines the extent to which the developing law of high seas fisheries, such as the Fish Stocks Agreement and the FAO Compliance Agreement of 1993, prepares the ground for compliance with future high seas regulations on the part of individual fishermen. It focuses on the target group of individual fisheries management, the fishermen, or the vessels under their charge. However, in the discussions of the United Nations Conference on Straddling Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, one of the most controversial issues was the extent to which a fishing vessel should be subject to the enforcement of other states than the flag state when fishing in high seas regions. In this chapter, possible compliance-inducing elements of the agreements as well as the issues of enforcement and regime linkages between the two agreements and other global and regional arrangements are discussed.

The evolution of a governance system for the pollock fishery in the Bering Sea Doughnut Hole is laid out in this chapter. It reviews the background and elements of the 1994 Convention on the Conservation and Management of Pollock Resources in the Central Bering Sea (‘the Convention’), a treaty that the six nations involved formatted to manage the pollock fishery of the Doughnut Hole. The relationship of the Convention to other developments in the international law of fisheries, particularly the Fish Stocks Agreement is also analysed in this chapter.

In many parts of the world, there continues to be various serious international disputes that are not amenable to negotiated solutions. Besides the improvements in the policing of fishing vessels and the need to ensure long-term sustainability of stocks, the availability of adequate compulsory procedures for resolving intractable disputes remains one of the main challenges of contemporary fishing law. This chapter aims to examine how far the international community has met this challenge. It begins by presenting the evolution of compulsory jurisdiction over fisheries disputes. The UNCLOS dispute settlement scheme and the settlement of disputes under the Fish Stocks Agreement are among the policies that are demonstrated in this chapter. Also, it cites several immense problems in using existing law to ensure that disputes relating to straddling fish stocks will if necessary be resolved by an independent third party.

After more than 20 years, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) still stands as a massive achievement in the history of codification efforts in international law. This chapter examines the role of the World Bank (WB) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the fund for which it acts both as trustee and as one of the three implementing agencies. The implementation role the LOSC itself seems to envisage for the WB, and the way this has been supplemented by the 1995 UN Fish Stocks Agreement (UNFSA), are discussed. The role and financing capability of the WB itself are also considered, along with the establishment, restructuring, and evolution of the GEF, and the role of international organisations in developing and implementing the LOSC. The chapter concludes by looking at a representative spread of the growing portfolio of projects of both the WB and GEF in the law of the sea area, including marine pollution control and fisheries management.

In this chapter, the international ramifications of capture fisheries management are examined, with the major focus being on the management internationally shared fish stocks, particularly those fish stocks crossing the boundary of the coastal state EEZ. The theory of games is found to be an essential tool of analysis, with the consequence that the economics of the management of these internationally shared resources is seen to be a blend of the economics of fisheries management examined up to this point and game theory. The policy implications of the forgoing economics are then discussed in detail. The chapter then goes on to examine a second aspect of the economics international fisheries management, namely that of the relations between coastal states and so called distant water fishing states. The chapter concludes by discussing the key links between the management of capture fishery resources at the national/regional level and at the international level.