Why and how to regionalise the Common Fisheries Policy

The concept of regionalisation, as it has been employed in connection with the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), is both ambiguous and multidimensional in the sense that it can have different meanings to different people and subsumes several discussions under one heading. Similarly, the perceived benefits of regionalisation can vary. In this article we develop a conceptual framework, which allows structuring of different, perceived benefits of regionalisation according to various objectives of CFP governance, as well as disentangling the different sub-themes that the discussion of regionalisation subsumes: the questions of ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘whom’. Eventually, we present a suite of five different models of regionalisation—‘archetypes’—that we believe are representations of important perspectives on what regionalisation means in practice and might facilitate a structured discussion of where the European Union should be heading in relation to fisheries governance: ‘Nationalisation’, ‘Regional Fisheries Management Organisations’, ‘Regional Fisheries Co-Management Organisations’, ‘Regional Marine Management Organisations’, and ‘Cooperative Member State Councils’.