https://www.who-owns-the-world.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/oceans.pdf

Neoliberalism in the oceans: “rationalization,” property rights, and the commons question

The emergence and effectiveness of the Marine Stewardship Council

The management of marine fisheries needs to undergo dramatic change in the new millennium, in response to the well-documented evidence of global overfishing and the general depletion of commercial fish stocks. The axioms of sustainable development and equilibrium productivity of wild ecosystems are identified as misleading concepts, which nonetheless underlie current approaches to the management of living marine resources. Current trends in marine fisheries landings worldwide provide little evidence of sustainability of marine resources under current management paradigms, where biological, economic and social aspects of fisheries are usually treated as different disciplines. While open-access conditions are less widespread than formerly, except for many straddling and highly migratory resources, fishers usually have access to the resource year-round throughout its range. Despite quotas, the nominal control of capacity and technical measures protecting juveniles, top-down management has generally been unable to prevent stock depletion, particularly of the older spawners that for demersal stocks often support recruitment. An integrated solution to the complexity of managing wild resources seems not to have been achieved. Any new paradigm should assert the basic unpredictability of fisheries at the system level and require a broader range of performance indicators to be incorporated into the decisional framework. This must reflect the non-equilibrium nature of marine systems, and give greater importance to resource (as opposed to harvest) continuity in the face of regime shifts, and promote habitat restoration and conservation of genetic resources. The new management framework requires co-management and collective decision-making to be incorporated within a precautionary and pre-negotiated management framework. This must explicitly recognize that decision-making occurs in conditions of model-based uncertainty and precautionary approaches should be incorporated at all levels, not least of which is to avoid the assumption that all resources can be harvested in a sustainable fashion through time. Redundancy in data inputs to management are needed to avoid the surprises that model-based sampling occasionally leads to, for example, when regime changes reduce productivity in response to climatic fluctuations. Emergency frameworks imposing non-discretionary rules must be invoked when overfishing and/or regime change trigger reference points indicating stock depletion. Non-discretionary recovery plans should then override rights-based systems and persist until fish populations recover to pre-established healthy levels, which may in turn need to await the return of a favourable regime. In fact, some stocks may require periodic rebuilding after regime-induced collapses or because of a combination of ecological or economic impacts, hence a constant harvest policy may not always be possible. It will probably also be necessary to discard the axiom that a stock should be available to harvesting throughout its range and seasonal cycle. Technological advances mean that time- and area-specific access rights are now practical options, through satellite monitoring of vessel operations, even offshore. More fundamentally, the basic axiom of "enlightened self interest" underlying current methods of management will need to be tempered by an increased ethical concern for the fragility of natural ecosystems.

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This is more difficult than we thought! The responsibility of scientists, managers and stakeholders to mitigate the unsustainability of marine fisheries

Part I. Foundations of International Wildlife Law: 1. The historical evolution of international wildlife law 2. Wildlife and the international legal system 3. The philosophical foundations of international wildlife law 4. Implementation and enforcement of international wildlife law Part II. Species Regulation: 5. Fish 6. The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 7. Birds Part III. Regional Wildlife Regulation: 8. The Convention on Nature Protection and Wildlife Preservation in the Western Hemisphere 9. The African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources 10. The Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats 11. Polar regions 12. Other regional and sub-regional arrangements Part IV. Global Wildlife Regulation: 13. The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands 14. World Heritage Convention 15. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora 16. The Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals Part V. Biological Diversity: A New Perspective on Wildlife Regulation: 17. The Biodiversity Convention and biosafety protocol 18. Deserts, forests and mountains Part VI. Cross-Sectoral Issues in Wildlife Regulation: 19. Wildlife and trade 20. Wildlife and welfare 21. Wildlife and pollution Part VII. Conclusion: 22. Final reflections.

Lyster's International Wildlife Law

Fisheries systems are widely considered to be ‘in crisis’ in both economic and ecological terms, a considerable concern given their global significance to food security, international trade and employment. The most common explanation for the crisis suggests that it is caused by weak and illiberal property regimes. It follows that correcting the crisis involves the creation of private property rights that will restore equilibrium between the profitable, productive function of fishing firms and fish stocks in order to maximize ‘rent’. In this approach, coastal states are seen as passive, weak, failed and/or corrupted observers and facilitators of the fisheries crisis, unless they institute private property relations. This paper offers an alternative analysis by using the perspective of historical materialism to re-examine longstanding debates over the problem of property and its relation to ground-rent in industrial fisheries. It identifies coastal states as modern landed property, enabling an exploration o...

The problem of property in industrial fisheries

Dealing with a Resource Crisis: Regulatory Regimes for Managing the World's Marine Fisheries

1. Scheiber is the Stefan Riesenfeld Professor of Law and History, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Carr received his J.D. from Boalt Hall in 1994 and is an associate at Beveridge & Diamond, LLP. He is also a Ph.D. candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. This article is dedicated to Professor Stefan A. Riesenfeld on the occasion of his 90th birthday. Funding for this research was provided by a grant from the United States Department of Commerce (NOAA) and the State of California through the California Sea Grant College Program, to the Ocean Law and Policy Program, Center for the Study of Law and Society, University of California, Berkeley. Agencies of the United States Government may reprint or distribute without restriction. The authors wish to acknowledge research contributions in the project's early phase by Noah Baum, J.D., graduate student in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, University of California, Berkeley, during the period of his service as a Sea Grant Trainee on the project; and to thank Professors James Wilen (UC Davis), Bonnie McCay (Rutgers University), Gfsli Pdlsson (University of Iceland), and other participants in the conference on ITQ policies at which a shorter (and preliminary) version of the present paper was first presented. The conference paper was published in a proceedings volume sponsored by the Nordic Council, see note 73, and portions are reprinted with copyright permission from the Council. We are also indebted to members of the Ocean Governance Study Group, especially Professors Biliana Cicin-Sain and Robert Knecht (University of Delaware), Richard Hildreth (University of Oregon), Jon Van Dyke and Casey Jarmon (University of Hawaii), David D. Caron (UC Berkeley), and, above all, William T. Burke (University of Washington) and Lee Anderson (University of Delaware) for provocative and insightful discussions of fishery policies at the annual OGSG meetings. We are also indebted to Ms. Kitty Simonds, Executive Director, Western Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Council, Honolulu, HI, for giving us access to the Council's extensive library collection; and to the late Prof. Kenneth Pitzer, College of Chemistry, UC Berkeley, for his advice on sources and his enthusiastic encouragement of the project.

From Extended Jurisdiction to Privatization: International Law, Biology, and Economics in the Marine Fisheries Debates, 1937-1976

Recent Developments in Compliance and Enforcement for International Fisheries

President Ronald Reagan's proclamation in December 1988 of a twelve-mile territorial sea for the United States represented a dramatic departure from the basic policy of the nation for nearly two centuries -a departure, that is, from the three-mile rule that had represented the United States' claim to offshore waters since the administration of George Washington.2 Reagan's almost offhand pronouncement -including its singularly opaque, if not to say obtuse, disclaimer denying that the nine-mile extension of the nation's territorial boundaries affected any state or federal law, rights, interests, jurisdiction or obligation!3 -was in another sense, however, squarely within the great American tradition of territorial sea law and policy. This tradition was one of great temporal voids between rare moments when the

Christopher J. Carr

Papers

Dealing with a Resource Crisis: Regulatory Regimes for Managing the World's Marine Fisheries

From Extended Jurisdiction to Privatization: International Law, Biology, and Economics in the Marine Fisheries Debates, 1937-1976

Recent Developments in Compliance and Enforcement for International Fisheries

Constitutionalism and the Territorial Sea: An Historical Study