1. Introduction
On 13 June 2025, on the eve of the 2025 UN Ocean Conference in Nice, Arnoldo Andre Tinoco, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Costa Rica and one of the conference hosts, concluded that over ‘100 high level representatives expressed their commitment towards the health and the governance of the Ocean’.Footnote 1 Indeed, the conference marked a historic step towards the ratification of the Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement, with the number of ratifying countries reaching 50.Footnote 2 With just ten more ratifications needed for the Agreement to enter into force, momentum is building around its core pillars: the sustainable use of marine genetic resources, mandatory environmental impact assessments, the promotion of capacity-building and technology transfer and, perhaps most importantly, the establishment of marine protected areas in international waters.Footnote 3 The upbeat mood and light spirit at the conference masked the 20 years of contentious negotiations, much of which revolved around financial burden-sharing and the potential economic implications of establishing such protected areas in international waters.Footnote 4
This tension hardly comes as a surprise. Both oceans and seas have long sustained the livelihoods of coastal communities and, with the advent of large-scale industrial fishing, also assumed greater economic relevance for many regions. Over time, the imperative to secure the long-term prosperity of these communities and business models, as well as to preserve marine biodiversity, has prompted the development of legal instruments that extend beyond national jurisdictions. The inherently transboundary nature of marine governance has spurred the development of various legal instruments to regulate fisheries and manage marine resources in the name of sustainability, economic coordination and exploitation. While national and regional authorities retain relevant competences for implementation and enforcement, fisheries and marine governance are largely shaped by international and European legal instruments, most notably the European Union’s Common Fisheries Policy (CFP).
While these frameworks are negotiated at the transnational level, their implementation has socio-economic effects at the local level – effects that are not only distributional but also existential. Legal and policy shifts reshape the everyday life of those who live with and off the sea, restructuring traditional practices and livelihoods in ways that may create more opportunities or deepen instability and social exclusion. These dynamics are often obscured by a technocratic mode of environmental governance in which decisions are treated as expert driven and apolitical. Limits are set – ostensibly to protect ecological systems – but these are frequently contested, bypassed or unevenly enforced. Yet they still produce tangible effects on the everyday realities of certain social groups whose voices and knowledge are often excluded from policy-making.
This article explores these dynamics through the case of Graña, a former fisherman from the Galician town of Corrubedo, whose story is recounted in Ben Judah’s book This is Europe: The Way We Live Now. Graña’s experience serves as an entry point for interrogating the role of law in the everyday life of fishing communities – and the extent to which legal frameworks contribute to the emergence of what we call ‘tragic questions’ in people’s ordinary life (Section 2). From this vantage point, we critically examine the Common Fisheries Policy and the IUU Regulation, highlighting their disconnect from the complex social and ecological contexts they seek to regulate and the forms of alienation this produces for fishers such as Graña (Section 3).Footnote 5 That disconnection, we argue, raises deeper questions about how the principle of subsidiarity, as enshrined in Article 5(3) Treaty on European Union (TEU), is to be operationalised – an ongoing debate that lies at the heart of numerous disconnects and forms of alienation within EU governance, both in Corrubedo and elsewhere (Section 4). Finally, we reflect on what this may require, arguing that the principle of subsidiarity could serve as a normative foundation for a more reflexive fisheries policy (Section 5). The article advances the claim that the legitimacy of transnational environmental governance depends on its capacity to meaningfully incorporate the voices and lived experiences of those it most directly affects. By tracing how legal frameworks negotiated far from the communities they affect shape the concrete choices available to people such as Graña, this article contributes to the collective inquiry into the law of the everyday in Europe – revealing the everyday as the site where the costs of governance accumulate and where tragic choices are lived rather than resolved.
2. Graña’s story and tragic questions
Graña is a fisherman in the Spanish town of Corrubedo. Legal frameworks regulate his profession as a fisherman, shape his opportunities and ultimately determine his fate. At the same time, these structures fail to provide him with stability or a lasting sense of belonging. Once a member of a traditional fishing community, Graña witnesses the transformation of Corrubedo from a village centred on small-scale fishing into a site increasingly dominated by tourism, foreign investment and gentrification. As the economic and social fabric of his hometown shifts, Graña finds himself increasingly disconnected from his surroundings. Despite his estrangement, he continues to rely on the sea for work – it is the only life he knows. It is also these jobs on fishing vessels that take him to distant regions of the world, far from Spain’s shores.
During one such job in Thailand, Graña is offered a position overseeing the engines of the Kunlun. Initially tasked with maintenance work while the ship remains at anchor, he soon learns that the Kunlun forms part of a fleet engaged in illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. The ship is set to depart for the waters surrounding Antarctica, targeting Patagonian toothfish. Graña is aware of the risk and illegality, but his hesitation does not last long. He decides to roll the dice and join the undertaking as chief engineer, because the prospect of making serious money outweighs returning home to Corrubedo.
As the vessel travels south, the ship’s legal identity is obscured: its name is painted over, a flag of convenience is raised and radio silence is maintained. Upon arrival in Antarctic waters, large-scale fishing begins. Before long, the operation is disrupted by the appearance of a law enforcement vessel of an undisclosed jurisdiction on the radar. This changes the paradigm of the journey. What had started as a chase for money turns into a prolonged chase for safety as the Kunlun attempts to flee. The pursuit stretches for months, and the crew grows increasingly tense and fatigued.
Eventually, the enforcement vessel abandons the chase. Having just narrowly escaped, the Kunlun resumes fishing before beginning its return journey. As the ship heads back, the crew unsuccessfully attempt to further obscure the ship’s identity. However, the authorities are already positioned in port, waiting for the ship to return. As legal action against the crew is initiated, Graña attempts to take his own life. He survives and returns to Spain, where he is brought to court. Ultimately, he is fined €3000 for environmental crimes, with no further charges brought against him. No longer able or willing to return to the sea, Graña spends the rest of his life in Corrubedo.
When one reads Graña’s life in retrospect, one may see his life – like any life – as made of choices. He chose to be a fisherman; he chose to engage in illegal fishing; he chose to attempt suicide; at last he chose not to be a fisherman anymore. It is quite easy to see one’s life as a sequence of choices, and to judge those. Looking at the ‘everyday’ instead, allows us to consider the practical questions that precede choices. In everyday life, we constantly address practical questions: ‘What should I do?’ Most of these are ‘obvious questions’ – for example, ‘Should I go there by bus or by car?’, which can be responded to using a utilitarian framework, weighing the expected gains and losses following from a certain action. Yet, in some instances we are confronted with ‘tragic questions’: ‘Are any of these alternatives free from serious moral dilemmas?’ Much of modern legal and economic thinking is underpinned by cost-benefit analysis, which helps us to answer obvious questions but does not help us either pose or answer any tragic questions. If anything, it suggests that such questions do not exist. By contrast, Martha Nussbaum convincingly argues that some costs have a particular nature: they are bad in a particular way.Footnote 6 Nonetheless, institutions often obscure the presence of such tragic questions and leave citizens to bear such costs – instead of facing the tragic question, where it is pertinent, which would help us design a society where unpalatable choices do not confront people, or confront them less often.Footnote 7 In this context, to follow the law becomes in itself a factor to be weighed by citizens in a cost-benefit analysis.Footnote 8
In the following section, we consider whether EU law itself contributes to opening up not just obvious questions for Graña, but tragic ones.Footnote 9 While EU legal discourse does not entirely overlook the tragedies at the heart of this story,Footnote 10 the regulatory responses that ensue, such as quota negotiations, and fisheries’ and local action groups’ processes and administrative sanctions, often exacerbate them. As a result, fishermen face a few choices: reinventing their practice, themselves, or reinventing legality. In the end, such choices point to one question: What does it mean to live within (or against) the law when transnational legal frameworks fail to account for everyday life?Footnote 11
3. The Common Fisheries Policy
The Common Fisheries Policy can be seen as shaped by the logic that foregrounds ‘obvious questions’ while obscuring tragic ones. This can be seen by first tracing its development. The 1958 Treaty of Rome did not provide a legal basis for a standalone fisheries policy,Footnote 12 so fisheries products were initially covered as agricultural products by the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).Footnote 13 Nevertheless, the first structural and market regulations in the fisheries sector were introduced in 1970.Footnote 14 The 1992 Treaty of Maastricht recognised this de facto expansion of competences by adding ‘common policy in the sphere of … fisheries’ to the list of Community activities,Footnote 15 thereby separating it from the CAP. A further major step followed with the Treaty of Lisbon, which established fisheries as an area of shared competence between the EU and the Member States, confirmed the exclusive competence of the EU over the conservation of marine biological resources and made co-decision between the Council and the European Parliament the ordinary legislative procedure.Footnote 16 Although the CFP was formally separated from the CAP, neither the Maastricht Treaty nor the Lisbon Treaty formulated fisheries-specific objectives.Footnote 17 Instead, the CFP inherited objectives from the CAPFootnote 18 that were poorly suited to the fisheries context.Footnote 19 For instance, increasing capacity and productivity in the short term is likely to lead to over-fishing and to threaten long-term productivity.Footnote 20
Already in the 1970s, and despite severe depletion, the CFP was mainly concerned with distributing fishing rights rather than addressing over-fishing.Footnote 21 Given the impracticability of geographical allocation,Footnote 22 the CFP was built on the principle of equal access for EU vessels to all EU waters.Footnote 23 CFP objectives outlined in the treaties, having survived in the same form since the Treaty of Rome, remain silent on environmental outcomes.Footnote 24 As a result, sustainability entered the CFP through secondary legislation, and therefore with a lower normative status. In 1983, the Council established ‘a Community system for the conservation and management of fishery resources’,Footnote 25 aimed at protecting fishing grounds and balancing the conservation of marine biological resources with their exploitation on a lasting basis under appropriate social conditions.Footnote 26 This system introduced fixing total allowable catches (TACs),Footnote 27 allocated them among the Member States through national quotasFootnote 28 and established technical parameters of the fishing gear.Footnote 29
The 2013 reform of the CFP appears, at least on paper, to have given priority to environmental sustainability.Footnote 30 The 2013 Fishing Regulation made the long-term environmental sustainability of fishing activities its central objective and,Footnote 31 for the first time,Footnote 32 introduced a quantifiable target requiring the exploitation rate to achieve maximum sustainable yield by 2015.Footnote 33 To this end, it also introduced a landing obligationFootnote 34 and strengthened the regulatory toolbox aimed at conservation.Footnote 35 Even so, TACs, national quotas, and gear regulations remain the core instruments of the CFP.Footnote 36
In this sense, the sustainability arm of the CFP reflects a particular tragic world-view, most clearly captured by Hardin’s famous ‘Tragedy of the Commons’.Footnote 37 This logic justifies turning commons into catch quotas and catch quotas into commodities, assuming that this will resolve the dilemma of resource governance and conservation. Yet this approach suffers from at least two weaknesses. First, fishing opportunities – including TAC percentage shares – are distributed among Member States through national quotas, which are then allocated to national fleets.Footnote 38 Aside from their questionable capacity to resolve the problem of overfishing, quotas tend to restrict access in an increasingly unequal manner.Footnote 39 This is because their transferability and marketability make room for ‘accumulation, speculation, and even monopolization’,Footnote 40 and they therefore often exacerbate issues of exclusion, arbitrariness and socio-economic inequality.Footnote 41 Second, TACs have historically been set at levels exceeding biological sustainability,Footnote 42 making them ill-suited to address the serious conservation challenges faced by the EU.Footnote 43 According to the Commission,Footnote 44 this has begun to change, as the 2013 Fishing Regulation requires fishing opportunities, including TACs, to be fixed at a level that allows fish stocks to be restored and maintained above levels capable of producing maximum sustainable yield, in line with the targets and timeframes set by multiannual plans.Footnote 45
Arguably, it matters not only that the tragedy is not obscured (that is, complex issues are not assumed to need a merely technical fix), but also that the underlying assumptions are accurate. Hardin’s thesis has been challenged, most notably by Elinor Ostrom,Footnote 46 who showed that communities are capable of governing common resources without relying exclusively on centralised control or market mechanisms.Footnote 47 The disconnect between EU law and everyday life may also stem from the opacity of decision-making at the transnational level. Fishing quotas are largely negotiated behind closed doors at the Council of the EU, often with limited regard for scientific advice and for the voices of affected communities.Footnote 48 At the same time, these instruments do not land in a vacuum.Footnote 49 Legal frameworks interact with existing traditions and cultural practices; however, the assumption is that people will not resist top-down changes, even when these alter their everyday life.
A. The effects of the CFP on fishing communities
An ethnographic study of the CFP’s effect on North Shields, a historic fishing town in northern England, illustrates some of these exclusionary dynamics.Footnote 50 The 1983 national quotas were based on historical catches between 1973 and 1978.Footnote 51 However, geopolitical events such as the ‘cod wars’ and the 1973 oil crisis reduced British catches in the reference period, resulting in a lower-than-expected national quota.Footnote 52 Because of the principle of relative stability,Footnote 53 these quotas have remained largely unchanged.Footnote 54 In response, the UK expanded its licensing regime and introduced decommissioning schemes for fishing vessels, detaching licences from boats.Footnote 55 This gave rise to the so-called fireside or armchair fishers, who no longer fished themselves, but rented out their licences to others still active in the profession.Footnote 56 These measures had some exclusionary effects. First, licences became valuable commodities, making it difficult for newcomers to enter the profession at a reasonable price.Footnote 57 Second, the decommissioning schemes benefited vessel owners but not crew members, which, combined with the strict enforcement of the quota system, contributed to fishermen leaving the profession.Footnote 58
The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) has acknowledged the need to tailor legal frameworks so traditional practices and special exemptions can be accommodated in small-scale fisheries.Footnote 59 Such practices are often embedded in historical and cultural contexts, and failure to account for this risks alienating communities from institutions even further. Similarly, several plans of action of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) pledge to encourage participatory governance, including co-management bodies through which fisheries regulations and related socio-economic initiatives can be developed and enforced.Footnote 60 These concerns resonate with broader debates in EU law about legitimacy and political alienation.Footnote 61 Although the Treaties grant citizens the right to participate in the Union’s democratic life,Footnote 62 enabling the affected community to exercise public autonomy remains difficult. The challenge is therefore how local experiences can meaningfully enter transnational governance while still preserving a universal dimension. Whose everyday realities should the law recognise? And can it do so without reproducing Eurocentric or anthropocentric forms of exclusion?
The CFP’s Structural Policy has attempted to support coastal communities, mainly through industry funding.Footnote 63 Over time, these financial instruments have gradually incorporated local actors in some aspects of decision-making. One example is the creation of Fisheries Local Action Groups (FLAGs), a community-led local development initiative aimed at strengthening employment and territorial cohesion in coastal areas.Footnote 64 FLAGs were later incorporated into different funding frameworks,Footnote 65 which reflected a shift in strategic focus to the development of a ‘sustainable blue economy’ beyond fishing.Footnote 66 This transition, however, has also raised concerns that small-scale fishers and dependent communities may be marginalised.Footnote 67 As a result, FLAGs may risk reinforcing established power structures and existing hierarchies,Footnote 68 despite their aim of harnessing the endogenous potential of rural areas.Footnote 69
Similar dynamics have been observed in Spain, where, on the conservation side, individual transferable quotas and decommissioning programmes that permit the scrapping of vessels without forfeiting fishing rights were introduced to comply with national quotas.Footnote 70 On the development side, in Galicia where Corrubedo is located, the first FLAGs were activated in 2009, generally benefiting local communities.Footnote 71 However, the complex bureaucracy of the system has resulted in the concentration of funds in larger cofradías de pescadores, traditional associations of small-scale fishers, and the marginalisation of smaller actors.Footnote 72 Therefore, although the CFP’s exclusionary effects have not been studied in the Spanish context, it is possible that similar dynamics are at play in Corrubedo, pushing some fishers to leave the profession and others, such as Graña, to resort to clandestine activities, including IUU fishing.
This aspect of the CFP – potentially fatal for both its objectives of sustainability and the economic development of coastal communities – appears to have been largely overlooked. In this sense, what appears as regulatory closure may also be understood, in Calabresi and Bobbitt’s term, as a ‘subterfuge’, where the system does not resolve exclusion, but instead reallocates and obscures it.Footnote 73 The CFP does not attempt to reintegrate fishers who, like Graña, operate outside this logic. Rather, as we will see, it penalises them through the notion of IUU fishing,Footnote 74 which casts them as scapegoats responsible for ‘the most serious threats to the sustainable exploitation of living aquatic resources’.Footnote 75
B. The residue of the everyday: illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing
The CFP addresses illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing through two instruments. The Control Regulation establishes a general system for ‘control, inspection, and enforcement … to ensure compliance’ with CFP rules,Footnote 76 while the IUU Fishing Regulation creates a specialised system ‘to prevent, deter, and eliminate’ IUU fishing.Footnote 77 Together, these instruments identify serious infringements of the CFP,Footnote 78 including fishing without a valid licence,Footnote 79 failure to record and report catch dataFootnote 80 and the use of prohibited or non-compliant fishing gear.Footnote 81 Any of these may trigger a presumption of IUU fishingFootnote 82 and lead to ‘effective, proportionate and dissuasive administrative or criminal sanctions’.Footnote 83 Crucially, the framework allows for a double sanctioning regime,Footnote 84 resulting in divergent national implementations and, more importantly, a structural shift in how responsibility is allocated.Footnote 85 In some cases, although illegal fishing may be criminalised,Footnote 86 administrative law takes precedence in practice.
The Spanish case Vidal Armadores illustrates this shift.Footnote 87 In 2016, a joint operation by the Spanish Police for the Protection of Nature and INTERPOL led to the capture of the Kunlun, Songhua and Yong Ding, vessels engaged in toothfish poaching, and to the indictment of six individuals.Footnote 88 However, the Spanish Supreme Court dismissed the criminal charges because ‘in order for crimes committed by Spaniards outside Spain on board ships flying flags of convenience to be investigated and prosecuted by Spanish courts, the indispensable condition is either the existence of dual criminality (that the crime is also punishable in the state where it is perpetrated) or that it is so provided by an international treaty ratified by Spain’.Footnote 89 This was not the case, as the vessels were operating on the high seas and the applicable Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources does not impose on the Contracting Parties an obligation to prosecute activities related to the IUU fishing.Footnote 90
However, this did not affect the administrative sanctions imposed on Vidal Armadores.Footnote 91 This is due to two factors. First, the administrative liability attaches not to the act of fishing itself, but to the participation in the operation of vessels, identified by the relevant regional fisheries management organisation as engaging in IUU fishing, including commercial, corporate and financial activities.Footnote 92 Second, defendants in administrative proceedings do not, by definition, benefit from safeguards applicable in criminal procedure, such as legality or proportionality.Footnote 93 This is problematic, as in Spain administrative penalties can be more severe than criminal penalties.Footnote 94 For example, ‘the accessory sanctions of the suspension of professional activity or of fishing activities imposed by participation in the exploitation, management and ownership of a vessel recorded in the EU IUU vessel list … may add up to 23 years in duration if the owner of the vessel or the captain have directly or indirectly participated in the management or exploitation of several vessels included in the IUU vessel lists’.Footnote 95 Hence, they are likely to fall within criminal law for the purposes of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).Footnote 96 A judgment of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) to this effect, as in the case of Grande Stevens v Italy,Footnote 97 may lead ‘to the revision of a significant number of contentious administrative judgements’.Footnote 98 This calls into question whether the Spanish system is proportionate, as required by the IUU Regulation.
4. Rethinking fisheries policies through transnational localism
The analysis in Section 3 suggests that the CFP and the IUU framework do not just regulate fisheries through technical instruments of conservation and enforcement, but also structure the conditions under which fishing communities live and work. In cases such as Corrubedo, these frameworks contribute to a growing distance between transnational decision-making and lived experiences at local and national levels, and between regulatory choices and their social and ecological consequences. Against this background, one way of overcoming this tension might be to approach the problem with what has been termed ‘transnational localism’.Footnote 99 This approach challenges the assumption that globalisation necessitates uniform global solutions, but also recognises that purely local approaches fail to address the interconnectedness of shared challenges.
Approaching the law of the everyday through the lens of transnational localism would mean bridging the gap between local autonomy and transnational governance by recognising community-led legal and governance practices within broader regulatory frameworks. Recognising local governance structures, such as small-scale customary rules that have governed fishing prior to EU integration, could mitigate the estrangement felt when law is perceived as external, rather than as an expression of collective self-determination. At the same time, while transnational localism would seek to de-alienate local actors (for instance, by incorporating their knowledge and practices into transnational legal frameworks), it may risk reproducing other forms of exclusion. EU law’s claims to universality often overlook the asymmetries of power that emancipate certain groups while alienating others.Footnote 100 This is visible, for example, in the analysis of FLAGs and redistribution mechanisms, where formal participation and funding structures may still reinforce existing hierarchies within coastal communities.
The challenge would then be to ensure transnational localism does not become another form of selective recognition, privileging certain voices – for example, by deferring to a fixed, idealised notion of community. In this context, it becomes more a question of whether transnational structures can move beyond mere procedural inclusion towards redistributing legal and political agency. Perhaps this question is ultimately tied to how the principle of subsidiarity, as enshrined in Article 5(3) TEU, is operationalised – an ongoing debate at the heart of many disconnects and instances of alienation in EU governance, in Corrubedo and beyond.
5. Conclusions
In this article, we have argued that Graña’s story can be seen as exemplifying the disconnect between the ambitions of transnational legal frameworks and the everyday lives they inevitably regulate. The promise of sustainability – enshrined in instruments such as the CFP and reinforced at global gatherings such as the UN Ocean Conference – and the bargaining for economic exploitation, frequently appear to conceal deeper fractures caused within affected communities. As we have seen, these fractures are economic and existential: they cut through the fabric of everyday life, undermining long-standing identities and traditional practices. While the law increasingly concerns itself with the governance of shared resources – biodiversity, the high seas, the atmosphere – it often does so through instruments that leave little room for contestation or democratic agency at the local level. Graña’s trajectory from small-scale fisherman to criminalised actor in a global shadow economy reveals how the everyday becomes entangled with distant legal regimes that obscure tragic questions and the complexity of a situated experience.
What emerges is a form of legal alienation, in which law is experienced as an external and indifferent force. The everyday, then, becomes the residual space where the costs of governance accumulate, where the burden of reconciling ecological limits, economic survival and normative disorientation is experienced by individuals such as Graña. As a consequence, his story invites us to ask whether, in its current configuration, the law leaves room only for ‘obvious’ decisions, technically rational, administratively enforceable, politically decontextualised, while sidelining tragic questions that expose conflicting duties and incommensurable values. This does not mean rejecting transnational regulation, but rather asking how such frameworks may be more attentive to local practices and forms of knowledge, for example, drawing from the approach of transnational localism. EU law’s principle of subsidiarity, if taken seriously, could be a normative starting point for such an approach, allowing law to become not just an external structure to live with or against, but a meaningful part of everyday life.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Loïc Azoulai and Jack Meakin for their generous guidance in the development of this project, and all the other participants to the EU Law of the Everyday Seminars at the EUI for sharing this collective inquiry. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewer for their insightful comments and suggestions, which significantly improved the article. All remaining errors are our own.
Competing interests
The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.
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