Fisheries Governance Affecting Conservation Outcomes in the United States and European Union

Abstract

Fisheries management in the USA, as governed by the Magnuson–Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), has been decidedly more successful at meeting its conservation goals than has fisheries management in the EU, as governed by the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP). In an effort to explain the different outcomes in these two systems that share many management attributes, we evaluated them against a list of effective governance attributes gleaned from the literature. We also examined the distribution of rights and responsibilities within each system, and the resulting stewardship incentives. Five effective governance attributes are fully realized under the MSA but have historically been absent from the CFP system: adequate regulatory authority, effective enforcement mechanisms, science-based decision-making, conservation-oriented goals and clear objectives, and directives. These governance system gaps, along with uneven distributions of rights, responsibilities, and incentives, may be responsible for the observed difference in conservation outcomes.

Keywords:

• Fisheries management
• fisheries policy
• governance
• institutions
• rights and responsibilities

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to Jessica Landman, Monica Goldberg, Whitney Tome, David Fluharty, and Ernesto Peñas-Lado for providing their expertise on these two fisheries management systems. In addition, we are grateful to the Walton Family Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for providing funding to the Environmental Defense Fund that made this research possible. The views expressed in this publication are solely those of the authors and have not been reviewed by the funding sources or affiliated institutions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Stocks are excluded from this 58% statistic if they meet either of the GES criteria. The remaining 42% includes: 20% of assessed stocks in the EU fished at sustainable exploitation levels (i.e., F ≤ F), 10% with reproductive capacity intact (i.e., SSB > SSB), and only 12% in GES for both criteria.

2 Approximately 60% of European landings come from stocks that are assessed, although this is variable for the two different GES criteria used: fishing mortality (F) and spawning stock biomass (SSB). There is a clear trend from north to south, with more than 90% of Baltic Sea landings coming from assessed stocks, and less than 10% of Mediterranean and Black Sea landings coming from assessed stocks.

3 Of the 478 stocks and stock complexes managed in federal fishery management plans, information existed to make overfishing status determinations for 300 (63%) and overfished status determinations for 230 (48%) in 2013. A total of 28 stocks from the former category were subject to overfishing, and 40 from the latter were overfished at that time.

4 With implementation for all fisheries subject to overfishing by 2010 and all other fisheries by 2011.

5 The Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (FCMA), passed in 1976 and entering into effect March 1, 1977, was renamed the Magnuson FCMA in 1989. The 1996 reauthorization again renamed it the Magnuson Sustainable Fisheries Act, and the 2007 reauthorization resulted in the current name—the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, or the Magnuson-Stevens Act for short.

6 Amendment passed in 2006, signed into law in January 2007.

7 Negotiations took place, and new language was agreed to, in 2013. Reformed law went into effect on January 1^st, 2014.

8 Due to non-discrimination clauses in the US constitution and the MSA, RFMCs cannot discriminate based on state of origin or ethnicities. The CDQ program is thus careful to assign quota to communities based on proximity to the Bering Sea. While this does also identify communities that are predominately Native Alaskan, that is not the basis for the allocation in law.

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to the Walton Family Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for providing funding to the Environmental Defense Fund that made this research possible.