Conference Agenda

This panel represents the first series of research papers from a multi-year, interdisciplinary and multi-national research project. This project focuses on the NGO Sea Shepherd and its evolving worldwide efforts to fight illegal, unregulated and unlicensed (IUU) fishing. This research project (and this panel proposal) studies the innovative partnerships Sea Shepherd has developed with various Northern and Southern states to jointly patrol their maritime exclusive economic zones (EEZ), and examines how these public-private partnerships impact maritime security governance. Drawing on fieldwork and embedded participant observation across Europe and Africa, our panel’s researchers use various interdisciplinary methodologies to investigate the following issues: Drawing on fisheries management literature, paper one asks in what ways can Sea Shepherd impact the deterrent and legitimacy of a state’s fisheries management system, and thus increase compliance amongst fishers? Using elite interviews and process-tracing, paper two asks what has caused Sea Shepherd to move away from radical and violent direct-action campaigns that caused hostile confrontation with states, towards a more moderate approach, focused on state collaboration and partnership? Paper three uses social movement, organizational studies, and public administration literature to examine how and why the European Union impacts and restricts the operations of the subsidiary Sea Shepherd Italy to a purely information-sharing role with Italian officials, relative to the more aggressive Africa campaigns of Sea Shepherd Global. Paper four explores how market mechanisms are driving cooperation between governments and NGOs like Sea Shepherd in the domain of sustainable fisheries management, and identifies the political and financial trade-offs involved in market-based joint enforcement versus purely public enforcement.

In the literature on fisheries management, compliance with regulations has received increased attention over the past few decades. There are two main approaches to the understanding of why fishers comply (or not), building on wider traditions in economics and sociology. In the traditional economic literature, often referred to as the instrumental perspective, compliance with the law has largely been viewed as the result of cost-benefit calculations on the part of individuals, and of deterrence on the part of the public authorities. In the sociological tradition, or normativeperspective, compliance is more often seen as reflecting personal moral and the legitimacy enjoyed by public authorities. Legitimacy is viewed as a political capital that the authorities can draw on in ensuring compliance with public regulations. Enforcement is considered necessary in both perspectives, but in the sociological tradition effective enforcement has a function beyond deterrence. It contributes to the legitimacy of the system and hence has the potential to increase compliance with regulations. The role of communication is also emphasized in the sociological perspective. Fisher compliance is believed to increase if the rationale behind the regulations, and the science underlying it, is properly communicated to the fishing fleet. Likewise, compliance is assumed to increase if inspectors are viewed by fishers as competent (having adequate fisheries knowledge), fair (not discriminating between fishers) and reasonable (listening to their explanations of non-compliant behaviour and with a margin of tolerance to make individual expert judgements of the severity of a violation). In a traditional deterrence perspective, the inspector performs the duty of the policeman/-woman, while in the alternative approach he/she takes the role of a consultant, whose main role is to assist the fishers to operate in compliance with the regulations. The paper discusses the potential effects in a compliance perspective of private actors taking over enforcement of fishing regulations at sea, partly or in full, as Sea Shepherd has done in several African states and in Italy. In what ways can private enforcement increase deterrence and the legitimacy of the management system, and hence increase compliance, among fishers?

Scholars have focused considerable attention on the problem of interest group formation and

maintenance. Grounded on the seminal work of Mancur Olson (1965) and the considerable scholarship that his ideas inspired, the existing research suggests that interest groups that pursue collective goods (goods that are enjoyed by all people even if they do not contribute to the expense of forming or maintaining the groups that pursue these goods) face significant organizational hurdles. Environmental groups that aim to protect public goods, like our oceans, are believed to be particularly vulnerable to this problem, which is commonly referred to as the free-rider problem. The scholarship in this area suggests that groups often overcome the free-rider problem when a single entrepreneur invests time, energy, and resources into the initial formation of the group. The “interest group entrepreneur” bears the initial organizational burden as an investment in the future of the group. Much less has been written about the role of the interest group entrepreneur after public interest groups have formed, during the

maintenance stage of a successful group. Due to resource limitations, groups have to make strategic decisions related to which issues they prioritize. This raises the question, do key decisions about issue prioritization continue to reflect the preferences of the entrepreneur, who was vital to the group’s founding, or, as the group becomes more established, do countervailing influences begin to override the central role of the founder? Whose voices are heard, whose are ignored, and what happens when there are substantial disagreements among key stakeholders of an interest group? For the most part, these questions remain unanswered by the existing interest group scholarship. This paper explores this issue through a case study of the Sea Shepherd organization, an environmental group that was founded by

environmental activist, Paul Watson, for the purpose of implementing confrontational direct-action techniques to protect whales and other marine species. In recent years, the group has moved away from its radical direct-action methods toward a more moderate approach that focuses on collaboration with marine resource managers of developing nations. Using a series of elite interviews, this study explores the decision-making process that led to this substantial change to the group’s approach to ocean conservation.

Over the past decades, NGOs such as Sea Shepherd have joined forces with governments to combat illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing. While such private-public partnerships are quite a common form of addressing global governance problems, it is a rather radical shift for the involved NGOs to shift from outward opposition and militant actions against states toward close cooperation with individual governments. Also, cooperation varies significantly across regions. Compared to Africa, where off the coast of, for example, Gabon or Liberia, Sea Shepherd partners with the coastal police and provides fully-equipped vessels as well as professional crews for the public guards to conduct armed inspections of suspected illegal fishing boats, partnerships are still the exception in Europe and are limited to information exchange. What accounts for these differences? Based on the case of Italy, where Sea Shepherd conducts campaigns against illegal fishing in the South Tyrrhenian Sea and in the Liguria region and works together with law officials, this paper examines the reasons for the variant patterns of cooperation as well as the effects. Drawing on social movement, organizational studies, and public administration literature, I argue that the more limited engagement we observe between Sea Shepherd Italy and public authorities is reflective of the European Union’s fishery regime as well as the self-understanding of the organization which differs from its global counter-part which conducts the missions in Africa.

In this paper I explore how market mechanisms are driving cooperation between governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the domain of sustainable fisheries management. Nongovernmental actors perform a variety of functions in environmental governance, from agenda-setting and norm diffusion to holding governments and corporations accountable through ‘naming and shaming,’ and enhancing states’ implementation capacity through supplying technical and scientific expertise. Lately, NGOs have also assumed a growing role in enforcement of environmental laws and regulations, through both independent ‘vigilante enforcement’ and by working jointly with states and sub-state public authorities to enforce fisheries regulations in coastal as well as international waters. For example, since 2016, the NGO Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) has formed fisheries protection partnerships with the governments of Gabon (2016), Sao Tome Principe (2016), Timor Leste (2017), Mexico (2018), Tanzania (2018), Namibia (2019), and Gambia (2019) which focus on enforcing local fisheries regulations. Such public/private enforcement agreements have emerged next to efforts to address the problem of illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing through pure market means, such as voluntary standards or certification schemes aiming to regulate the behaviour of fishing corporations, or the introduction of tradable permit programs for fisheries. My paper seeks to answer the question, what leads governments to favour joint enforcement over either purely public enforcement or reliance on market mechanisms. In doing so I seek to illuminate the political and financial trade-offs as well as the relative effectiveness of each mode.