Fisheries straddling or migrating between international maritime boundaries represent a typical case of the tragedy of the commons. Over two dozen Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs) have been created to manage these fisheries, which means it also represents a typical case of 'regime complexity' or 'governance architecture'. These literatures recognise that such institutions do not operate independently and therefore institutional functions such as attracting participants, practising their regulatory role, and performing their mandate should be understood as interdependent. This thesis proposes that we study such institutions together with actors and architectures of relations between and among them, which together I term 'governance complexes', by means of a relational approach. This relational approach combines relational theory, which posits the operation of endogenous relational mechanisms alongside exogenous explanations such as institutional design, with network methods that enable structural insights and robust inference that takes into account these interdependencies. The dissertation comprises two main parts that describe and explain the global fisheries governance complex, respectively. The first describes how the governance complex's three main components, states, RFMOs, and states participation in these RFMOs, have evolved. A topological typology utilising key network concepts is proposed and employed to show that the global fisheries governance complex is not fragmenting but becoming more overlapped and nested. The second part explains how this governance complex has evolved in terms of (1) participation, (2) practice, and (3) performance. First, it finds that while states find institutional design features such as an RFMO’s internal organisation attractive, relational mechanisms such as popularity and closure also provide important heuristics for participatory decisions in complex settings. Second, it finds that high levels of organisation also enables higher regulatory activity, but so do relational mechanisms such as coercion or imitation. Third, it proposes the concept of net effectiveness to gauge an institution’s "take-home" performance once its position in the broader governance complex has been taken into account. The result is not only an explanation of the evolution of global fisheries governance but also a developmental step towards an institutional relationalist theory of governance complexes.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:658531 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Hollway, James R. C. |
| Contributors | Snidal, Duncan |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:55d9e345-3057-4ea2-8447-99f5bd73795b |
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