Scalar politics in transboundary fisheries management: The Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission as an eco-scalar fix for South Pacific albacore tuna management

Abstract

Scholars and policymakers have debated the correct scales for managing and conserving ocean resources for decades. To address the conservation and management of highly migratory fish species, like tuna, countries have established regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) to regulate transboundary fisheries at the scale of oceanic regions. However, in the Western and Central Pacific Ocean region, countries have expanded their tuna management efforts to encompass multiple and overlapping intergovernmental institutions operating at regional and subregional scales. Scholars have argued that this proliferation of institutions across scales—including the development of the region’s RFMO, the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC)—has strengthened transboundary tuna management. However, while scholars focus on the successes of scalar dynamics in the tropical purse seine fishery, less attention has been devoted to the smaller and less valuable southern longline fishery, where management progress has stalled. Management inaction at multiple scales has impacted the status of the fishery’s target stock, South Pacific albacore, and domestic fishing and processing industries in Pacific Island countries and territories. This article employs a scalar politics lens to consider why multi-scalar efforts to improve southern longline fishery management have produced no decisive change in management outcomes. Analysing over a decade of management debate and subregional institutional development, the article argues that the WCPFC has operated as an ‘eco-scalar fix’ in managing the southern longline fishery. Through a combination of ecological and political factors unique to the fishery, this eco-scalar fix has enabled distant water fishing countries to locate political authority with the WCPFC while shifting the responsibility for management reform onto the subregional efforts of Pacific Island countries. This case complicates and contributes to debates concerning scale in transboundary fisheries management by concluding that the effects of scalar politics on management outcomes are uneven and the product of asymmetrical, interest-driven dynamics among countries seeking to advance their interests in industrial fisheries.