Do we need a global fisheries management organization?

Global fisheries are increasingly overfished. The existing international regulatory structure, a set of regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), has failed to prevent overfishing. Regulatory problems exist because of the common pool resource character of fisheries and the fishing overcapacity that results from short-term planning and the political power of domestic fishing constituencies. But the regulatory problem comes from the region and species focus of RFMOs (micro-regulation), which creates what we refer to as a “balloon problem.” Even when RFMO regulations restrict access to a particular species or region, fishers move to another region to fish or target different species to maintain their fishing effort. We argue that in order to address these issues successfully and create more effective international fisheries governance, we need to begin a focus on macro-regulation, the creation of rules that address the amount of total fishing industry capacity in the overall system. Copyright AESS 2013