The impact of Regional Fishery Management Organization structure on collaborative performance

Collaboration is integral to understand, plan, coordinate, and implement management measures for fisheries that cross international borders. Regional Fishery Management Organizations (RFMOs) are the main arenas for countries to collaborate and make decisions for transboundary fisheries, but these organizations have generally failed to prevent the depletion of some of the world's most valuable fish stocks. It is unclear how the structure and functioning of RFMOs can improve collaborative performance to better manage transboundary fish stocks. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, our study analyzes 10 RFMOs to identify the combination of six organizational conditions associated with high and low collaborative performance. Using United Nations-mandated Performance Reviews conducted by internal and external experts we assess RFMOs for six collaborative performance metrics based on international standards. Our results show that high collaborative performance requires distinct roles for Secretariats and committees, meaningful representation of stakeholders, and a small decision-making body. Specifically, ‘a high number of committees’ combined with a ‘a high diversity of Secretariat duties’ led to low performance overall, but when combined with ‘a low diversity of Secretariat duties’ led to high conservation and management performance. ‘A small Commission size’ was a necessary condition for high overall performance and compliance performance. ‘Low stakeholder involvement’ led to low overall performance and low financial and administrative performance. Current trends in global governance call for RFMOs to increase their number of contracting parties and expand their mandates to address the growing environmental challenges affecting transboundary fisheries. Our results show that as the membership and scope of RFMOs expand, managers should prioritize the inclusion of stakeholders and technical experts over additional bureaucrats to achieve collaborative performance goals.