Domestic sources of international fisheries diplomacy: A framework for analysis

Many international commercial fish stocks are threatened with depletion; in some cases they are already badly depleted. Through Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs), member countries are committed in principle to sustainable and scientific management of these fisheries. However, in practice, national policies toward international fisheries vary greatly across countries, from those that in practice support sustainable management to those that seem implicitly committed to fishing as much as possible in the short term. There has to this point been little comparative work looking systematically at the differences in international fisheries policies across countries, despite the importance to the effective management of international fisheries of understanding these differences. This article is an effort to address this lacuna in the literature, by creating a framework for comparing the domestic sources of differing international fisheries policies across countries. The proposed analytical framework looks at four types of differences across countries to explain variation in international fisheries policies, derived from the existing literature: fleet substitutability, the structure of the fishing industry in a state, regulatory capture, and environmental NGOs. The framework has significant potential to explain state positions in RFMOs negotiations. It may also contribute to further understanding of the general relationship between international negotiations and domestic politics.