Interactive governance for sustainable fisheries: dealing with legal pluralism

• Legal pluralism is a regular phenomenon in capture fisheries.
• Methods for assessing the implications of legal pluralism for governance are scarce.
• The interactive governance approach provides a useful entry point.
• One-size-fits-all governance solutions are likely to fail.

Legal pluralism creates problems as well as opportunities for the governance of capture fisheries. As there are important variations in the manifestation of legal pluralism as well as in the governability of individual fisheries, their assessment is of importance. This review paper asks how such a governability assessment may be carried out. For this purpose we make use of the interactive governance framework, pioneered by Jan Kooiman and the typology of legal pluralism relations brought forward by Bavinck and Gupta (2014). One conclusion is that because of the many variations between fisheries systems, one-size-fits-all governance solutions are likely to fail.