In October 2002, the Government of Norway, in cooperation with the FAO, convened an Expert Consultation on the Management of Shared Fish Stocks[1]. The rationale for the Norway-FAO Expert Consultation lay in the recognition of the fact that the management of these resources stands as one of the great challenges on the way towards achieving long-term sustainable fisheries.
This paper, in exploring the legal and economic aspects of the management of shared fish stocks, draws heavily upon the conclusions of the Norway-FAO Expert Consultation, as set forth in the Expert Consultations report, and upon the extensive set of papers presented at the Expert Consultation[2]. The papers provide overviews of the legal and economic components of shared fish stock management and do, as well, provide a wide range of case studies on shared fish stock management from many regions of the world, both developed and developing.
There are, as will be seen, four categories of shared fish stocks. The Norway-FAO Expert Consultation, by design, restricted itself to two of the four categories. This paper will attempt to extend the analysis, arising from the Expert Consultation, to cover all four categories.
[1] The Norway-FAO Expert
Consultation on the Management of Shared Fish Stocks, Bergen, Norway, 7-10
October 2002. [2] Both the Report of the Norway-FAO Expert Consultation and the papers presented at the Expert Consultation have been published. See: FAO, 2002a and FAO, 2003a. The Report and the Expert Consultation papers were presented to the Twenty-fifth Session of the FAO Committee on Fisheries, February 2003. |