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High seas fisheries were once seen as essentially limitless resources. Fishing in the open ocean, thousands of miles from home, was hard and dangerous work, but the risks did not include stock depletion. Modern fishing technologies, however, have created a condition of scarcity on the high seas. A focused effort by one of the world’s many large fishing fleets can deplete a species in a matter of years, and it is often not clear that the species is being overfished until there is a precipitous drop in its population. This puts a particular burden on international cooperation to manage these fisheries, for without cooperation both specific fish species and entire regions of the ocean can be degraded to the point where they neither provide economically viable resources nor sustain viable marine ecosystems. The onset of the degradation of a fish stock may indeed motivate the relevant international actors to cooperate to manage the fishery. Yet it may likewise motivate none of the actors to cooperate, in which case further degradation is likely, often to the point where the fishery ceases to be economically or even biologically viable. There is nevertheless a third possible outcome, when some states are motivated to manage the fishery effectively but others are not. This situation often leads to escalation , when states begin to treat fishery management as a political issue rather than an issue for scientific or functional management. Escalation may in many cases be a necessary route to get from degradation to cooperation, and as such, is a key focus of this chapter. The case of international cooperation to manage fisheries resources combines features that are found in many issues of international environmental politics. The fisheries in question are either located on the high seas, a global commons, or are transboundary, and therefore cannot be effectively regulated by one country. They are common resources, meaning that while there is a general incentive to manage the fisheries 7 Degradation and Cooperation on the High Seas: The Case of International Fisheries Management J. Samuel Barkin 142 J. Samuel Barkin sustainably, individual fishers have an incentive to fish as much as possible , before the stock is depleted. There is scientific uncertainty about how much fishing a stock or region can support sustainably, and there is political disagreement about who should get to do the fishing that can be supported sustainably. There are tensions between the needs for sustainable management of fisheries, and the economic and cultural demands of fishers and the consumers of fish. And once cooperative agreements are reached, there are problems of cheating, monitoring, and enforcement that plague so many treaties and international institutions (for a general overview of these issues, see DeSombre 2007). This chapter focuses on those elements of the relationship among scarcity and degradation, conflict and cooperation, that are most specific to international fisheries issues. It does not attempt to address all of the relevant concerns. For example, it does not discuss cheating and enforcement issues, which are indeed important to successful international cooperation to manage the world’s fisheries, but that are similar to the equivalent issues in other areas of international environmental cooperation . What this chapter does concentrate on is the interrelationship of the resource and commons aspects with the political economy of international fisheries cooperation. Fisheries represent the only contemporary international environmental issue that involves a resource in a global territorial commons that is being economically exploited to the point of degradation. It is this combination that makes the issue unique. I will begin by presenting the concepts of degradation, conflict, and cooperation that are at the intellectual core of this volume as a typology of political outcomes in attempts to manage international fisheries. I will then discuss the concept of common pool resources, which brings together both the resource and commons aspects of the issue. In this context, I will also highlight the various asymmetries applicable to the fisheries case, including differing levels of wealth among the parties concerned, the parties’ differing shadow of the future with regard to the well-being of the fisheries stock, the degree of a country’s dependency on the fish stock, and the directional nature of the fisheries in question. As a domestic counterpoint to the international characteristics of the issue, the following section will explore some of the characteristics of the domestic politics of international fisheries issues. Both the commons and domestic characteristics of these issues feed into the characteristics of international bargaining over the management of fisheries resources, which...

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