Co-management: an alternative to enforcement? Luc van Hoof

The decline in fish stocks worldwide has often been attributed to problems inherent with resources being treated as common prop-erty. Government is usually called upon to define and implement solutions, but the issues society face today cannot be dealt with by the classical, state-centred system of the industrial society. In this article, the Dutch case of fisheries management is used to demon-strate how a government-orientated solution, such as the recently inaugurated EU Community Fisheries Control Agency, and a governance-type solution, such as co-management, relate to each other and whether a partnership between government and the market, such as co-management, can serve as an alternative to direct government enforcement. Although the Dutch case is not a true-bred form of co-management, but rather a case of co-enforcement, it can be used to service a theoretical assessment of the possibilities of co-enforcement at a European scale