Private‐sector engagement in regional fisheries management organisations to which Australia is a party

Regional fisheries management organisations (RFMOs) are the entities responsible under international law for creating the conservation and management measures that apply to high seas fisheries. States must implement the conservation and management measures of RFMOs to which they are a party in their domestic legislation. One of the key challenges facing RFMOs globally is a lack of compliance by both contracting and non-contracting Parties. The current status of wild-capture global fisheries appears grim; with more than 80 per cent of global fisheries either fully exploited, or overexploited. The ability of RFMOs to enforce compliance with the conservation measures they administer is a critical factor in addressing the decline of high seas fish stocks. To date, the performance of RFMOs in this regard has been poor; with discontinuity between the compliance approaches of individual RFMOs cited as one of the key contributing factors to the challenges facing regional fisheries management. This thesis aims to make recommendations for reform to assist a specific group of RFMOs: RFMOs to which Australia is party (AusRFMOs). It investigates how AusRFMOs can become more adaptive and resilient to the challenges posed by non-compliance. It achieves this by testing the hypothesis that there are inconsistencies amongst AusRFMOs in their adoption of compliance measures. This thesis argues that private-sector engagement, where the entities being regulated by AusRFMOs become a part of the solution, represents a viable and practical solution to the problem of non-compliance. It is suggested that rather than continuing to focus on how legislative reform can strengthen regional fisheries management, private-sector engagement in the work of AusRFMOs represents an important alternative to the problems currently facing global fisheries