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© 2015 The Authors. Recently, a human rights approach has been center-staged within fisheries governance as a response to the limits of private property rights in reducing insecurity and vulnerability among fishers and fishing communities. Despite its growing adoption in international legal frameworks and among civil society organizations, the conceptual pitfalls of the human rights approach to fisheries (i.e., its neoliberal tendencies and the neglect of collective rights and social duties) raised by critical scholarship remain largely unsettled, leading to practical concerns about whether such a framework will ultimately benefit fishers on the ground. To further contribute to the debate, this article presents a nuanced discussion of the human rights perspective by introducing the concept of human dignity. Specifically, it argues that human dignity, with its greater conceptual scope and depth, could act as a foundational value with which to mitigate some of the shortcomings of the human rights approach. The purpose here is suggestive rather than definitive and is aimed at highlighting the link that has not been clearly made between human rights and human dignity. I argue that heightened attention to human dignity has the potential to create wider support for the human rights approach and ultimately help facilitate its efficacy in fisheries.

© 2018, The Author(s). This paper examines reproduction of marginality evident in fisheries. Uneven relations are widespread across geography and scale; between distant water fishing nations and coastal developing countries; between fishers on large-scale trawlers and smaller boats; between local elites and peasant operators; and between boat owners and crews working in poor and slave-like conditions. With inequality and social exclusion being such a pervasive phenomenon, we ask why do these relationships persist? Using governability, developed within the interactive governance approach, as an overarching basis for interpreting this issue, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the possibility that marginality is not only a feature of ungovernability but might also occur in a highly governable system. To advance this insight, we apply theoretical tools associated with Marxist-Gramscian political ecology to the case of small-scale fisher exclusion brought on by the implementation of an individual transferable quota system in New Zealand's commercial fishery. In particular, we identify social and economic relations that give rise to an accentuated capitalist structure whereby the quota-owning sector of the population (e.g., processing companies and Maori tribal organizations) control the ways in which fishers access economic benefits from their labor. Over the years, the quota system has gained acceptance as a resource management strategy, an intervention that is now ideologically hard to break away. The result is the reproduction of fishers' exclusion, which contributes to a governable fishery, rather than an ungovernable one. This understanding casts a critical note on what we mean by governability, directing our attention to the ethical questions regarding how fisheries are to be governed and the risks that come with its pursuit.

Recently, oceans have become the focus of substantial global attention and diverse appeals for "transformation." Calls to transform ocean governance are motivated by various objectives, including the need to secure the rights of marginalized coastal communities, to boost ocean-based economic development, and to reverse global biodiversity loss. This paper examines the politics of ocean governance transformations through an analysis of three ongoing cases: the FAO's voluntary guidelines for small-scale fisheries; debt-for-"blue"-nature swaps in the Seychelles; and the United Nations' negotiations for a high seas' treaty. We find that transformations are not inevitable or apolitical. Rather, changes are driven by an array of actors with different objectives and varying degrees of power. Objectives are articulated and negotiated through interactions that may reassemble rights, access, and control; however, there is also the potential that existing conditions become further entrenched rather than transformed at all. In particular, our analysis suggests that: (1) efforts to transform are situated in contested, historical landscapes that bias the trajectory of transformation, (2) power dynamics shape whose agendas and narratives drive transformational change, and (3) transformations create uneven distributions of costs and benefits that can facilitate or stall progress toward intended goals. As competing interests over ocean spaces continue to grow in the coming decades, understanding the processes through which ocean governance transformations can occur—and making the politics of transformative change more explicit—will be critical for realizing equitable ocean governance.

© 2017, Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services. All rights reserved. In this paper, we present the Inter-Institutional Gap (IIG) framework as a novel approach to conceptualizing the often-overlooked interconnectivity of different rule-levels between formal and informal institutions in a natural resource system. This framework goes beyond the existing concepts of legal pluralism, institutional void, structural hole, and cultural mismatch, each of which offer valuable insights to particular gaps between formal and informal institutions, but do not sufficiently address the interaction at every rule level (i.e. constitutional choice, collective choice and operational choice rules). In order to demonstrate the potential of our framework for better understanding the underlying causes of inter-institutional gaps, we apply it to four case studies that encompass diverse geographical locations, governance levels, and social-ecological systems. Results reveal that institutional gaps tend to exist when there are unintended, unforeseen or hidden gaps between the different rule levels operating among the different institutions involved in governing a single resource system. More specifically we observe that: (i) inter-institutional gaps are co-existing, therefore if a certain gap is identified, other gaps may be expected; (ii) certain gaps may reveal latent gaps; and (iii) intermediaries may be key to addressing inter-institutional gaps. In many cases, sustainable natural resource management and regulation cannot be achieved without directly addressing the inter-institutional gaps that exist between formal and informal institutions operating in the same resource system. The framework facilitates analysis and understanding of multi-level governance structures in pursuit of addressing complex natural resource management issues.

© 2019 The Authors Failure to address unsustainable global change is often attributed to failures in conventional environmental governance. Polycentric environmental governance—the popular alternative—involves many centres of authority interacting coherently for a common governance goal. Yet, longitudinal analysis reveals many polycentric systems are struggling to cope with the growing impacts, pace, and scope of social and environmental change. Analytic shortcomings are also beginning to appear, particularly in the treatment of power. Here we draw together diverse social science perspectives and research into a variety of cases to show how different types of power shape rule setting, issue construction, and policy implementation in polycentric governance. We delineate an important and emerging research agenda for polycentric environmental governance, integrating diverse types of power into analytical and practical models.