As a biologist asked to review a book on political science, I approached this book with some trepidation, which seemed justified by the jargon-laden text of the introduction. Thankfully, this soon dissipated to reveal a thoughtful and extensively researched analysis of the political workings of EU fisheries and, unfortunately, how the politics usually take precedent over the fisheries management goals.
Lequesne provides an abstracted overview of the history of EU fishing activity, whilst comparing the variability in approach between nations. He describes the many levels on which the various ‘actors’ interact, incorporates supply and demand problems into the explanation of how conservation measures can break down, and stresses how, within the EU, individual countries may have fundamentally different approaches and attitudes to fishery resources. However, this is not an ivory-tower journalistic study; Lequesne got his hands dirty and conducted face-to-face interviews with various scientists, fishers, management officials and politicians so as to examine the situation from all points of view (deciding in which situation his hands became dirtiest I leave to the reader). The result is that the problems and interactions he describes are current and ongoing.
Where fish stocks straddle the territorial waters of several nations, the ‘tragedy of the commons’ seems to be the inevitable result. Although the individual nations may recognize and express the will to control their fleets, as Lequesne states, the ‘dynamics of transnationised economies are . . . accompanied by a diffusion of responsibilities, which, in turn, blurs the exercise of political control’ (p. 111). In a zone encompassing such cultural diversity as Europe, the likelihood of instituting effective centralized control over shared resources such as implemented by the federal agencies of the USA remains slim. In fact the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) has already been described as a failure (Daw & Gray Reference Daw and Gray2005). Lequesne does not claim that the CFP has succeeded in substantially improving fisheries management (on paper, maybe, in practice, not really), but points out that mechanisms such as the CFP contribute to the growth of collective decision-making that would otherwise not come about.
Lequesne uses the issue of driftnetting as an effective example of how little science really impacts on policy decisions relative to public opinion as expressed by the media. Scientific evidence that dolphins were really suffering population-level impacts from the use of drift nets in the Atlantic was not always all that compelling, but televised images of entangled animals were. Of course, banning driftnets was strongly supported by Spanish Basque tuna fishermen who used more selective, but less cost effective, pole and line methods. This is one instance of fairly cynical manipulation of an environmental issue that happened to have an end result that suited a particular fishing sector.
This book illustrates clearly how one's point of view may change the facts or, at least, the interpretation thereof. To a biologist, solutions to declining fish stocks are relatively simple: kill fewer fish. To a fisherman, such a solution is anathema. Like many of us, their views tend to prioritize personal short-term economic considerations over the long-term common good. This is the crux of all fishery management problems. This is an accomplished work on a complex and difficult subject, and I suggest that its readership should include fishery managers to enhance their understanding of what happens to their recommendations after they have been made.
One of the valuable things about this book, for me, is how clearly Lequesne illustrates the human problems that invariably dog fisheries management, not only in Europe, where things are complicated further by multinational diplomacy, but also to a greater or lesser extent in other geographical arenas where single countries have sole jurisdiction over their waters. In fact, I had the feeling that the problems faced by Europe are in fact the same as elsewhere, just with larger-scale bureaucracies to be dealt with. The question is, now that the problems are better understood, does anyone have the will to address them?
