Conference Agenda

Collective action for managing the world’s ocean fisheries relies on cooperative agreements that establish regional fisheries management organizations or RFMOs. I show that an RFMO can sustain full cooperation only for fisheries shared by n≤4 countries. For n ≥ 5, parties to a fisheries agreement continue to adopt the full cooperative effort level, with non-parties applying more effort on top of this. Increasing n from four to five causes rents to fall abruptly. As n→∞, participation approaches n/2, and rents vanish. For values of n in the range of today’s RFMO-managed fisheries, rents are positive but only because they would be positive in the absence of an RFMO. I then study what an RFMO could achieve under a hypothetical regime in which the right to fish on the high seas, established in customary law since the early 17th century, is made conditional on participation in the relevant RFMO. Under this regime, full cooperation can be sustained for n≤9. As n increases from 9 to 10 and beyond, rents fall but remain significantly higher than under today’s regime (four times higher as n→∞). Finally, I show that this hypothetical regime can be sustained as an equilibrium in customary law. My model thus predicts that it should be possible to change today’s rules of the game of high seas fishing so as to attenuate, though not eliminate, the tragedy of the ocean commons worldwide.