Reproduced, with permission, from:
Levy, M. A., Robert O. Keohane, and Peter M. Haas. 1992. Institutions for the earth: Promoting international environmental protection. Environment 34 (4): 12-17, 29-36.
Ocean fisheries can be regulated by allocating access to fish and by avoiding overfishing and overinvestment in fishing equipment. An international fisheries management system was organized to prevent overfishing, which was easier to define and raised fewer political problems than did directly addressing overinvestment. This system gives fisheries management an environmental focus and means that the success or failure of policy can be judged by the relative availability of steady fish stocks.
Before 1977, ocean fisheries were open-access, common-pool resources because of the traditional freedom to fish on the high seas. Although governments sought to coordinate their management efforts through joint regulatory commissions, the open-access rule created a highly contentious contractual environment in which each state sought to avoid having to adjust its fishing effort. The joint commissions lacked either the authority or the monitoring capacity to alter that environment. As a result, the international commissions' success remained very limited, even though concern existed and capacity, in the form of better fisheries science, was increasing.
The potential for preventing overfishing increased when the contractual environment was transformed in the mid 1970s. The exclusive economic zone, accepted gradually by all states during the 1970s, gave coastal states the authority to allocate fish catches within their zones, which accounted for about 90 percent of the resource. International commissions became responsible only for fisheries when stocks were found partly within or outside the 200 mile limit, while a group of UN-sponsored regional advisory commissions became major contributors to increasing the regulatory capacities of developing states. Management of fish stocks has improved, though many experts believe that government could improve it further by adopting different forms of national regulation. Today, international institutions are significant mainly as mechanisms for helping to maintain concern and build developing state capacity.