Barriers to Collaborative Governance in New Zealand Fisheries: Pt I

Abstract

AbstractRecurrent ecological crises in fisheries throughout the world make it imperative that a fundamental re‐alignment of institutional arrangements occurs in order to promote sustainability. Collaborative institutional arrangements that provide incentives for collective action are seen as a more effective way to solve this problem than the more traditional hierarchical regulatory or market led approaches used in the past. While the merits of devolved collaborative governance have been stressed in recent fisheries literature, this paper is the first in a series of two which attempt to critically examine the barriers which impede collaboration in fisheries, using a New Zealand case study. This first paper introduces the New Zealand fisheries context, and continues with a literature review of the theories underpinning collaborative management with insights from the current debates on localised governance of natural resources informed by institutional analysis approaches.