Are climate change and declining fisheries productivity likely to lead to a future of fish wars, or can existing fisheries management institutions evolve to help prevent large-scale fisheries conflict? From militarized fishing practices in the South China Sea, to the ongoing wrangling between the European Union and Great Britain over fishing rights, to violent clashes between indigenous and non-indigenous fishers in Canada, fisheries are at the center of many international, or at least inter-governmental, disputes.

Climate change is likely to exacerbate these problems. Marine species will move as oceans warm and acidify, which fundamentally reshapes the geographic distribution of fish populations and fisheries’ productivity. With forecasts of large declines in catch potential and associated revenues in some countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), fishers may follow migrating stocks into the high seas or other countries’ EEZs, including into the polar regions where geopolitical competition between major powers is already underway. Unaddressed, these trends run the risk of unilateral militarization and sparking conflict. Conflict over fisheries are a surprisingly frequent cause of militarized disputes between states.

A future of greater fisheries conflict is not foreordained, however. Multilateral governance efforts could result in better, more adaptive management of fisheries and create peaceful mechanisms for fisheries dispute resolution moving forward. In particular, existing regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) could provide governance and dispute resolution mechanisms that could peacefully manage fisheries disputes.

What’s an RFMO?

Regional fisheries management organizations, or RFMOs, are international organizations of countries that share practical and economic interests in conserving fish stocks in a particular region. These regions are often incredibly vast: the five major RFMOs that cover highly migratory and valuable fisheries like tuna, swordfish, and billfish, collectively cover 91 percent of the world’s oceans. Notably, the areas with least comprehensive coverage are near the poles, reflecting historically their inaccessibility and remoteness, even for Arctic countries.

RMFO membership is made up of both coastal states, those states whose waters and EEZs contain the species, and distant water fishing nations (DWFNs)—those states whose fishing fleets travel to areas where the fish are found. For example, Japan, South Korea, and China are all member of the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, which covers the waters of the eastern Pacific Ocean.

What do RFMOs do?

RFMOs perform a variety of functions that facilitate shared governance of transboundary resources: providing statistical assessments of the health of the fishery, assessing resource management strategies and practices, and perhaps most importantly, assigning binding catch limits and practices for specific species within the RFMO’s domain. They convene meetings of member state representative and technical specialists.

However, all RFMOs are not alike. Whether due to differences in member-state composition or the robustness of their funding and scientific capacity, some RFMOs have been assessed as more resilient to climate change, better at addressing by-catch, and more transparent in their scientific and decision-making processes, including decisions related to resolving disputes and addressing individual countries’ objections to particular decisions, which can exempt them from the otherwise binding RFMO rules. However, most RFMOs do not have provisions for addressing the most common types of fisheries disputes involving member-state navies, coast guards, and private vessels. That is, the types of disputes they are designed to resolve are not the types of disputes that are at the heart of most militarized fisheries conflict cases. 

Can RFMOs manage fisheries conflict?

RFMOs could be a vehicle for managing these more militarized types of fisheries conflicts for three reasons, ranging from the abstract to the concrete. First, as international institutions, joint membership in these bodies tends, on margin, to pacify relations between states, even if the organizations are not specifically mandated to do so. There is now a large body of literature on the peace-promoting effects of participation in international organizations. One of the most interesting findings is that membership in international institutions can have powerful effects for state behavior even when the organizations in question have nothing to do with the specific issue at hand. On margin, membership in international organizations seems to socialize states into international norms governing the use of force as a policy instrument.

Second, these kinds of shared resource management institutions temper the high politics of statecraft by providing a regular arena for the low politics of resource management and policing. Heads of state and their cabinets face a variety of incentives, and have competing claims on their actions and public positions. For this reason, they tend to see even mundane policing issues as a tool of broader statecraft—a leverage point in negotiations, or a chip to be traded for concessions on some other issue. In contrast, the kinds of people who wind up attending RFMO meetings are often highly trained technicians with an unglamorous job to do, and they wouldn’t be doing this unglamorous job if they didn’t fundamentally care about the resources they are managing. As such, in times of tensions, they can reach out to one another as scientific colleagues and friends, rather than government officials—or at least combine both identities when they come to the table.

Finally, RFMOs could, pending some institutional reforms, actually play a role in resolving disputes, or at least specifying alternate mechanisms by which these disputes can be resolved. Research on transboundary river treaties shows a robust conflict-suppressing effect as the treaties include more institutional features like dispute resolution mechanisms. Related research suggests that these institutions are particularly useful when the underlying resource base is highly variable, as is the case with migratory fish stocks.

In early 2020, we wrote on the potential of one RFMO—the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (IOTC)—to develop dispute resolution mechanisms. The IOTC’s mission is being made ever more complicated by the increasing competition over fisheries in the Indian Ocean, as well as a rise in illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing practices. However, among the many committees and working groups that inform the IOTC, no entity is tasked specifically with investigating or resolving disputes between member states. In fact, while the IOTC agreement permits the formation of sub-commissions to promote cooperation on the management of stocks, to date, member states have not proposed any such sub-commission. It may be time to revisit the idea of cooperation-promoting sub-commissions, both within the IOTC and more broadly.