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This chapter examines the legal regime governing the management of fisheries in Community waters, i.e., those waters under the sovereignty or jurisdiction of EC Member States. An initial issue is the question of how far the competence to adopt management measures for Community waters falls within the competence of the EC, and how far within the competence of Member States. It considers in turn total allowable catches (TACs) and quotas, effort management, technical measures, Member States' delegated powers, access to fishing grounds, the nationality of fishing vessels, enforcement, and capacity adjustment. It also discusses fishing by Third State vessels in Community waters, and the reform of the EC system of fisheries management.

This chapter focuses on: the EC's participation in the global instruments discussed in Chapter 3, which lay down the basic norms of current international fisheries law; EC access agreements with third States; and EC membership of regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs). Negotiating and concluding global fisheries instruments, bilateral access agreements, and membership of RFMOs obviously involves the exercise of treaty-making powers by the EC. The chapter looks at the source and scope of the EC's competence to negotiate and become a party to treaties in the field of fisheries. Finally, it considers EC involvement with some other international fisheries management issues.

The management of marine fisheries is evolving rapidly in response to evidence of overexploitation, climate change impacts, and the recognition of the multiple uses and conservation needs of the marine ecosystem. This chapter reviews the contribution of ecosystem science to this change in vision, and to its implementation through the Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries (EAF). The EAF is guided by the need to manage ecosystems for their long‐term benefit, taking into consideration their multiple use and the cumulative and long‐term impacts of such uses. This chapter argues that the EAF provides the foundation for increasing interaction between the ecosystem science and fisheries management communities, as an essential step to achieve sustainability of marine resources.

This essay reviews data on tradable permit systems in various contexts, including air pollution regulation, water supply, fisheries management, grazing rights allocation, water quality, and wetlands preservation. These programs are evaluated against three criteria: implementation feasibility, environmental effectiveness, and economic effectiveness. The analysis makes clear that the particular characteristics of these different regimes affect the evaluation of their performance. Beyond reporting substantive results for each program, the essay offers insight into the methodological difficulties of ex post evaluations generally. For example, not all studies define economic efficiency or environmental effectiveness in the same way, and studies vary in their choice of comparative benchmark or counterfactual, which can significantly affect results. Ex post evaluations differ as well in terms of both scope (i.e., which outcomes are considered exogenous and which endogenous) and timing (i.e., the point in the life of the program when the evaluation is done). All of these choices can influence the resulting interpretations.

This chapter discusses the roots of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). It outlines the various actors, interests, and processes involved in the formulation, adoption, and development of the CFP. The history of the CFP falls fairly naturally into five periods: the years 1957-73 (covering the conception, birth, and early development of the CFP); 1973-83 (the adoption of an EC system of fisheries management in response to major changes in the international law of the sea); 1983-92 (the challenge of Iberian accession and the consolidation of the EC's fisheries management system); 1993-2002 (the second decade of the fisheries management system); and the period since 2002, which has seen major reform of the CFP and an almost doubling of the EC's membership. Each of these five periods will be looked at in turn.

This paper focuses on the co-management approach to regulating common property resources. The nature of co-management arrangements or contracts, and applications of co-management in various countries, particularly coastal fishery management in Japan are discussed. The success of co-management lies in its operation within a framework where the state integrates the populations concerned during the early design stages of the resource-preserving strategy. Given the ‘culture of distrust’ in relationships between the State and local resource users, development projects initiated by local or foreign donor agencies play a key role within a co-management framework of action.

This chapter analyzes the idea that extractive use of “renewable” living resources can be sustained by imposing simple management measures. It reviews the history of the analyses and models developed to describe the reproductive behavior of marine living resources in relation to exploitation. Many of these were deterministic models and they led to the development of the concept of maximum sustainable yield (MSY), an approach to fisheries management that is still dominant although it has been discredited scientifically for many years. The question of sustainability is addressed and problems of the current approaches to multispecies management and ecosystem management are discussed.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, an estimated 52 percent of fish stocks are fully exploited and producing catches at the maximum sustainable limit. A further 25 percent of stocks are overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion. Moreover, a majority of the most important commercial species are considered to be fully or overexploited. Because more than 90 percent of commercial fisheries are located within the exclusive economic zone (EEZ), effective mechanisms for conserving and managing fisheries within 200 nautical mile EEZs remain of fundamental importance. This chapter examines the general framework established by Part V of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) and suggests that its failure to spell out a sufficiently coherent obligation to steward resources within the EEZ has contributed to the collapse of many domestic fisheries. A number of binding and non-binding instruments which have emerged post-LOSC are also considered, along with the future of international law on fisheries and the conservation and management of living resources under the LOSC, including the prevention of overfishing.

Since the conclusion of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) more than 20 years ago, the fishing industry has changed dramatically. New technologies have increased fishing vessel efficiency and capacity, and have provided access to previously remote fish stocks. This has created three major challenges to the legal regime for high seas fisheries under the LOSC: declining fish stocks in the high seas due to overfishing, growing biodiversity concerns, and proliferation of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing activities such as overfishing. In the face of these challenges, the framework of the LOSC may be sound but insufficient. These challenges have revealed the weaknesses of the LOSC regime, which relies on the effectiveness of regional fisheries management organisations and the voluntary compliance of flag states to ensure conservation and management of living resources in the high seas.

The health of fisheries is difficult to assess, because catches are only partially recorded and abundance cannot be directly observed. Understanding the status of fisheries requires an estimate of what they are capable of producing in the absence of fishing, yet data rarely extends back to pre-exploitation states. Without catch and abundance estimates across a range of fish densities, it is difficult to estimate the capacity of a fishery. Historical data (historical, archaeological, and geological records; ecological reconstructions; local and traditional ecological knowledge) provide that information. These data can help managers avoid “shifting baseline syndrome,” in which stock-rebuilding programs are influenced by the most recent peak in productivity. Such approaches can also help small fisheries, where standard assessments and assumptions aren't applicable and where historically based analyses can provide scientific advice to guide management. This chapter, by Alan M. Friedlander, Joshua Sladek Nowlis, and Haruko Koike, shows how historical data can inform fishery assessment, using case studies from small tropical fisheries, which present complex challenges due to the number of species exploited, the variety of gear employed, and the diffuse nature of fishing locations and landing sites. Communities worldwide are combining historical data and local knowledge to manage fisheries. By incorporating these data, we bring insight into the past yield of these ecosystems and provide guidance for future management.

This chapter reviews the current literature on the ecological outcomes of various fisheries management strategies from a climate change perspective. Management of the fisheries capture process can be categorized into six main restrictive actions. These include restrictions on the area where people can fish (such as marine protected areas), the times that people are allowed to fish (seasons), the size of targeted fish (minimum or maximum), the types of species targeted, the gear used, and the amount of fishing effort. This chapter reviews the empirical research on how these various strategies: 1) impact local resource users; 2) affect the local ecology; and 3) build ecological resilience in the context of climatic disturbances.

This chapter focuses on international fisheries management. It provides illustrations to aid understanding of the concept of high seas resources and the cooperative involvement under their protection. Concepts specific to common fisheries resource scarcity and international political involvement are thoroughly examined. Major work has been done on the interrelationship between common resources and international political cooperation. The author also highlights various asymmetries, which are of concern to the fisheries and their management. The concluding section of the chapter consists of key limitations and agreements that are related to the management of international fisheries.

The first chapter in Part II tackles the first expected political response based on the AC/SC framework: direct exclusion of outsiders. It shows how the earliest known fisheries management regimes were all based on exclusion, with only minimal implementation of conservation-oriented measures, even when local fisheries were severely over-exploited. It then goes on to show how the desire to exclude fishers from other countries and essentially appropriate fishing grounds helped shaped the formation of sovereign states and then later the development of international law and international fisheries management.

This chapter discusses matters in respect of which aquaculture may require regulation. These include: (a) requiring authorization for the establishment and operation of an aquaculture installation; (b) preventing and controlling disease in aquaculture installations; (c) regulating possible pollution damage to, or resulting from, aquaculture; (d) controlling the use of alien or genetically modified species in aquaculture; (e) marketing and trade; (f) tuna farming; and (g) public financial assistance for aquaculture.

The negotiations leading up to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) focused mainly on the fishery issue inside the 200 nautical mile limit, with the creation of the totally new concept of the exclusive economic zone. This chapter examines the issues raised by the relationship between the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the LOSC with respect to protection of biodiversity and fisheries management. It seems that there is no hard-and-fast rule in contemporary international law regulating the relationship between the different international treaties concerned with the conservation and management of commercially exploited aquatic species. Increased cooperation is needed for states to be able to tackle the problem of overfishing on the high seas.