The Contested Commons: The Failure of EU Fisheries Policy and Governance in the Mediterranean and the Crisis Enveloping the Small-Scale Fisheries of Malta

Alicia Said,Douglas Macmillan,Joseph Tzanopoulos

doi:10.3389/fmars.2018.00300

Alicia Said, Douglas Macmillan + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2018.00300

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Abstract

This paper highlights how multi-scalar interstitial policy failings of the EU fisheries policy can directly trigger policy gaps in fisheries management at the expense of artisanal communities, leading to further expansion opportunities for industrial fishing and triggering instability and marginalisation of traditional fishing communities. In order to contextualize and demonstrate this complexity, we explore a detailed scenario of the Maltese waters to show how the development of a national policy portfolio post-EU accession has destabilized long-existing functional fishing governance mechanisms and now pose a direct challenge to the sustainable management of the marine socio-ecological system. Using a mixed-method approach to investigate the partially obscured social, economic and political dynamics which drive marine policy, we demonstrate how the coastal fisheries have become subject to multiple-use competition arising primarily from a burgeoning recreational fishing sector that has benefited from ‘access-enabling policies’, and is, to a great extent uninhibited by fish conservation regulations. Our findings demonstrate how a deeper understanding of the socio-political ramifications of policy processes is necessary to improve the governance and management of contested and congested open-access fisheries.

Highlights

The global crisis of diminishing fish stocks is pervasive (Coulthard et al, 2011) with international efforts to resolve this human-induced catastrophe stubbornly ineffective (Bodin and Österblom, 2013)
The Contested Commons: Fisheries Policy-Gaps shown that risks to fish stocks has not receded, mainly due to, policy-induced problems which are fuelling the overexploitation of the fisheries (Colloca et al, 2013; Fernandes et al, 2017)
Upon EU accession, the national government initiated the process of transposing the obligations of the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) to Malta

Summary

Introduction

The global crisis of diminishing fish stocks is pervasive (Coulthard et al, 2011) with international efforts to resolve this human-induced catastrophe stubbornly ineffective (Bodin and Österblom, 2013) This is especially the case in the Mediterranean Sea (Vasilakopoulos et al, 2014; Cardinale and Scarcella, 2017), that hosts a fishing fleet of around 91,540 fishing vessels (FAO, 2016) from more than 20 countries making it one of the most intensely fished seas worldwide (Fernandes et al, 2017; Panagopoulou et al, 2017) with more than 85% of the assessed stocks overexploited (Colloca et al, 2013). What is less understood is how or whether this small-scale sector degeneration is being managed or addressed by the governance and policy systems in place, especially that the EU has recently pledged to support the sustainable development of Mediterranean small-scale fisheries through the Medfish4Ever roadmap (European Commission, 2017)

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