The Issue
Ninety percent of the global fish catch is taken
within zones of national jurisdiction, owing
primarily to the higher productivity and proximity
of the coastal and shelf areas. It follows,
therefore, that these are the areas where the bulk
of fisheries management problems occur.
Such problems are not a new development: for 50
years at least, recognition has been given to the
need for governments to be aware of the state of
their fisheries, to implement effective policies
aimed at preventing resource depletion and the
wastage of fisheries inputs and, increasingly, to
facilitate stock rehabilitation.
With about 60 percent of the main monitored
commercial stocks considered to require improved or
new management, the current state of world
fisheries indicates a need for better governance.
The challenge for governments is to manage
fisheries in such a way that ensures the optimum
and sustainable use of resources as well as
economic efficiency and widespread social benefits.
Furthermore, it is increasingly recognized that the
responsibility for management should not rest with
governments alone but rather be a shared
responsibility, involving those operating in the
fisheries sector as well as others who consider
they have a right to participate in decisions
concerning humanity's natural heritage.
In the 1980s, it was widely anticipated that
fisheries governance would improve substantially in
parallel with the establishment of extended
national jurisdiction under the United Nations
Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This was
the case for countries that were able and had the
will to strengthen their governance. Very often
they were already engaged in exclusive economic
zone (EEZ) fisheries or had readily available
capacity (e.g. trained fishers, investment capital
and infrastructure) within the sector to do so.
Subsequent experience has shown that, even under
the most favourable circumstances, achieving good
governance is a protracted process. Those
governments that now have soundly managed fisheries
generally owe this achievement to 20 to 40 years of
continuous effort and adjustment.
In many countries, governance has continued to
languish for a variety of reasons, including a
scarcity of the human, institutional and financial
resources required to devise and implement
management programmes; a lack of understanding, by
both governments and fisheries participants, of the
potential benefits that good management can
generate; and the reluctance of governments to make
unpopular decisions.
Through aid and financial assistance projects,
the international community continues to direct
substantial efforts towards improving the
capabilities of the fisheries institutions in such
countries. The countries with the poorest
governance are those whose populations face more
pressing, fundamental problems such as war, civil
disturbances, natural disasters and weak
government.
Possible Solutions
The prerequisites for good governance in the
fisheries sector are generally well recognized: the
need for a strategy explicitly aimed at ecological,
economic and social sustainability; effective
fisheries agencies and research institutions
(producing, inter alia, reliable and
up-to-date information on the sector); a
cooperative, organized and informed fisheries
sector; adequate laws and legal institutions,
including deterrent monitoring, control and
surveillance (MCS); and linkages with the
appropriate regional and international bodies.
Since the early 1980s, attention has been paid to
giving the fisheries sector joint responsibility
with government in the management of fisheries. In
many instances, this has been recognized by law, as
in the creation of statutory committees (e.g. on
management formulation, licensing and appeals)
whose members include representatives from the
fisheries sector. In some countries, this has been
extended to the creation of semi-autonomous
fisheries management authorities acting under joint
industry and government boards of control.
This joint management process has been
facilitated by a number of important evolutionary
trends. In many countries, the fisheries sector has
become better organized and hence more effective in
liasing with government and in representing
collective viewpoints. A more recent impetus has
come from management regimes that establish either
real or quasi ownership "rights", such as the right
to trade - buy, sell or lease - an entitlement to
engage in a managed fishery. In such circumstances,
those with an entitlement have more of a vested
interest in good management, as the "monetary"
value of their entitlement will be directly
influenced by the performance of the fishery.
Accordingly, titleholders have demanded a major
role in the formulation of management.
Another important and related trend concerns the
financing of fisheries research and management. An
underlying concept gaining wider acceptance is that
financing should come from those who benefit,
including fisheries participants in the case of
managed fisheries. Again, there has been added
impetus from the creation of "rights-based"
fisheries, where it would clearly be anomalous for
governments - using funds from the broader
community - to be the sole financing entity.
Accordingly, the joint financing of fisheries
governance has been most readily accepted in the
case of rights-based fisheries. As might be
expected, fisheries participants have demanded a
role in deciding how the money is spent, leading to
more focused spending and systems of
accountability. The consequence has invariably been
better governance.
A recent trend in management-oriented research
is for the scientific arm of management to have
more autonomy when providing advice and for there
to be more transparency as to what action is taken
on the strength of that advice. There has also been
a related move towards "privatizing" certain
functions of governance, a development that is most
advanced in the case of fisheries research
institutions, which are becoming progressively more
reliant on non-government sources of finance. There
have been rare instances in which countries have
hired out the functions of licensing and
enforcement to private sector entities, although
the government has invariably taken a major
shareholding in the entities selected. This has met
with mixed success so far, but probably reflects
the direction that governance will take in the
future. Fisheries governance is now benefiting from
computer-assisted "networking", for example through
e-mail and the World Wide Web, which allows both
researchers and managers ready access to the
knowledge and experiences of "outsiders". Although
related to private sector services, this
development is not exactly part of privatization
but rather a consequence of globalization.
These trends are most apparent in countries
whose capacity for governance is well evolved. The
approaches nevertheless are globally applicable. A
major constraint to their wider application in
practice is a lack of organization within fishing
communities, including an insufficient
understanding of the potential benefits to be
gained through good management. The paradox for
some countries is that systems of community-based
management, which provided cohesion in the past,
have now disappeared. Aid and financial assistance
projects as well as other efforts are now aimed at
reversing this process, often through the
conferring of "rights" exclusively on active
members of the community or on the community as a
collective. Such an approach will be most
problematic - if not impossible in the short term -
in areas where there is a high population density
and acute poverty because of the high social cost
to those excluded from fisheries. The priority in
this event is to enhance the welfare of the wider
community (e.g. through job creation), and this is
a task that requires intervention from "outside"
agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and
the international community.
Action Taken
The promotion of traditional or community-based
management practices has gained momentum in
artisanal and small-scale fisheries, which often
involve thousands of fishers, hundreds of fishing
communities and a plethora of landing points. The
communities involved have very little mobility and
are liable to be extremely disadvantaged by the
social and economic consequences of bad governance.
Management that is directed at safeguarding a
community's welfare is most likely to be sensitive
to issues at the local level, and hence to the
importance of improving benefits from fisheries
without causing undue social disruption. The
community-based management approach therefore seeks
to build on existing customary and traditional
practices, adopting the concept of territorial use
rights in fisheries (TURFS).
The Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC)
is promoting the revival of traditional marine
tenure and resource allocation mechanisms in the
region. As part of this effort, SPC puts out an
information bulletin dealing with traditional
marine resource management and knowledge. However,
the pace of socio-economic change in the region is
such that it is uncertain what the need for fish
resources will be when all population groups have
become urban wage earners.
Recent advances in the management of industrial
fisheries at the national level have focused on the
conferring of rights. Most commonly, these rights
have included the ability to trade (buy, sell or
lease) the entitlement to fish in a particular
managed fishery. In most cases, entitlements have
been provided in the form of individual
transferable quotas (ITQs) or as a subset of a
limited number of licences to fish. This strategy
is being introduced successfully in a growing
number of countries, including Australia, Canada,
Iceland, New Zealand and the United States. The
adoption of rights-based management is also being
encouraged by international institutions such as
the World Bank.
Chile has introduced experimental ITQs in its
deep-water shrimp and its toothfish fisheries,
making it the only country in Latin America to have
a functioning ITQ system. The government would like
to expand the system to other fisheries but it
faces resistance from operators in the fisheries
concerned.
A High-Level Panel of External Experts in
Fisheries, which met at FAO headquarters in
January 1998, stressed the relevance of the Code of
Conduct for Responsible Fisheries1 for governance.
The participants concluded that the Code and its
guidelines are technically credible to fisheries
experts and readily understood by non-experts and,
therefore, constitute an important reference for
improved fisheries governance.
The 1996 annual meeting of the South Pacific
Forum (SPF), held in the Marshall Islands,
recommended the development of comprehensive
arrangements for the sustainable management of the
region's fisheries across the full geographical
range of stocks, including those of high seas. This
recommendation reflects countries' increasing
concern about the governance of high seas
resources.
Countries in the Pacific are working together
with Distant-Water Fishing Nations
(DWFNs)1 to develop a mechanism for the
conservation and management of highly migratory
fish stocks in the Central and Western Pacific
Ocean. It is envisaged that the negotiations will
result in a commission for the management of the
stocks concerned.
Southeast Atlantic countries are discussing,
among themselves and with DWFNs, the establishment
of a regional fisheries organization to manage fish
stocks in the high seas of the Southeast
Atlantic.
Members of the South Pacific Permanent
Commission2 are negotiating how to
conserve and manage high seas resources in the
Southeast Pacific.
Outlook
The conclusion that the world's main commercial
fisheries need more and better management is
neither surprising nor necessarily derogative of
national governance worldwide. Ultimately, all
fisheries require management as, where it is
lacking, wastage of fish resources and fisheries
inputs is inevitable. The benefits realized from
good governance are most obvious in the developed
countries and this has been the case for some time
because their capacity for governance is more
evolved. Furthermore, these countries have much to
gain from improved of fisheries performance. Much
of the global fishing capacity and most of the
world's mature fisheries - with stocks near to
being or already fully exploited - are located in
the fishing zones of these countries or in other
zones exploited by them.
With increasing fishing pressure and a better
knowledge of stocks, the joint management of shared
stocks will become a priority in the future.
As developing countries are becoming major
participants in global fisheries, the focus is
likely to shift to include improvements in their
fisheries governance. This will require the
enhancement of technical and administrative
capabilities, enabling the formulation and
implementation of appropriate fisheries management
plans and assessments of the outcomes and needs for
follow-up action. A fundamental policy
consideration in this regard is capacity building
and institutional strengthening within the
fisheries institutions. At the same time, it must
be accepted that improved benefits will not be an
immediate outcome from better governance. The
structural adjustments that are required in many
fisheries will take a long time to become
effective. Fisheries management is a process that
evolves over time in response to changing
circumstances.
In line with recent trends, the governance of
fisheries will progressively include the direct
involvement of fisheries participants, the
conferring of user rights, the devolution of
management functions away from government - without
detracting from its stewardship role - and the
financing of governance from within the sector.
1 The EC, Japan, Norway, the Russian
Federation and the United States
2 Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru
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