MACMILLAN Rethinking Fisheries Governance: The Role of States and Meta-Governance

This book explores how the state can foster collective action by fisher’s communities in fisheries management. It presents a different perspective from Elinor Ostrom’s classic work on the eight institutional conditions that foster collective action in natural resource management and instead emphasizes the role of the state in fisheries co-management, engaging a state-centric notion of ‘meta-governance’. It argues that first, the state is required to foster collective action by fishers; and secondly, that the current fisheries co-management arrangements are state-centric. The study develops these arguments through the analysis of three case studies in Japan, Vietnam and Norway. The author also makes a theoretical contribution to governance literature by developing Ostrom’s ‘society-centric’ framework in a way which makes it more amenable to the analysis of state capacity and government intervention in a comparative context. This book will appeal to students and scholars of global governance, fisheries management, co-management, and crisis management, as well as practitioners of fisheries management. Review “In this penetrating account, Hoang Viet Thang provides new insights into the way in which fishing communities contribute to coastal fisheries governance in Vietnam, Japan and Norway. The book offers detailed new empirical material and offers new theoretical insights into how fisheries associations work to forge productive forms of associative governance in the shadow of state hierarchy.” (Professor Stephen Bell, School of Political Science & International Studies,  The University of Queensland) About the Author Hoang Viet Thang is a researcher at the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, Australia. He previously worked as a policy consultant in fisheries management for the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations in Vietnam.