Shifting political alliances and new environmental challenges are prompting debate over processes of sub-regionalisation and whether the interplay between multiple scales of governance leads to positive synergistic outcomes or negative institutional disruption. Regional management of tuna fisheries in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean is an example where a web of treaties, conventions and institutional frameworks underlie international cooperation. Through examining the interplay between the regional Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission and sub-regional Parties to the Nauru Agreement, this paper explores the extent to which the PNA and WCPFC interact in the management of regional tuna fisheries. The results demonstrate that for contested marine resources such as fisheries, international sub-regions can go beyond functional units to also present wider opportunities to shift power relations in favour of small island states. Additionally, the presence of sub-regional groups like the PNA has served to challenge the performance of the WCPFC, stimulating greater debate and progress within the regional body. The paper concludes that the combined work of the PNA and the WCPFC puts them ahead on many issues and may represent a testing ground for a functional multilateralism utilising both regional and sub-regional governance platforms for the management of shared resources.
Private standards, including ecolabels, have been posed as a governance solution for the global fisheries crisis. The conventional logic is that ecolabels meet consumer demand for certified "sustainable" seafood, with "good" players rewarded with price premiums or market share and "bad" players punished by reduced sales. Empirically, however, in the markets where ecolabeling has taken hold, retailers and brands-rather than consumers-are demanding sustainable sourcing, to build and protect their reputation. The aim of this paper is to devise a more accurate logic for understanding the sustainable seafood movement, using a qualitative literature review and reflection on our previous research. We find that replacing the consumer-driven logic with a retailer/brand-driven logic does not go far enough in making research into the sustainable seafood movement more useful. Governance is a "concert" and cannot be adequately explained through individual actor groups. We propose a new logic going beyond consumer-or retailer/brand-driven models, and call on researchers to build on the partial pictures given by studies on prices and willingness-to-pay, investigating more fully the motivations of actors in the sustainable seafood movement, and considering audience beyond the direct consumption of the product in question.
Indonesia is one of the world's largest tuna producing countries, yet regulatory oversight remains weak and management is poor. Incentive-based approaches are a way to improve state-based resource management, but they often require strong government regulation. In this paper, we use principal -agent theory and the notion of the 'incentive gap' to explore how incentives could be brought to bear in Indonesia through a combination of private and public actors. With a shared fish stock like tuna, we argue that a double principal -agent problem emerges, where information, asymmetries between various players complicate management. We focus on the problems of adverse selection and moral hazard in three different tuna fisheries in Indonesia to identify the nature of the incentive gap, and comment on the mix of public and private actors currently engaged in tuna fishery governance towards reducing the gap. The double principal -agent problem is a useful yet underutilized framework to understand the dynamics of shared stocks management. In this first application to a developing country fishery, we conclude that information asymmetries cannot be overcome without the involvement of private actors, who are increasingly becoming important in aligning regional and global objectives with those of fishers themselves.
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