Food Sovereignty and the Politics of Food Scarcity

This chapter demonstrates how regional agreements emphasising cooperation and coordination enable multi-scale collaborative governance of tunas. In the Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO), the tuna fishery faces two major challenges to achieving conservation and development goals: the need to collaborate because of the fugitive nature of tunas and competing interests in relation to tunas. The recovery of fisheries across the globe today is attributable, in part, to the shift towards a collaborative form of governance that engages stakeholders and interested parties. In characterising interactive governance, Sørensen et al. (2015) distinguish cooperation, coordination and collaboration. Cooperation, coordination and collaboration are evident in the attempts to govern tunas and manage scarcity within the WCPO. The interactive nature of governance arrangements in the WCPO give rise to a mode of collaborative governance that brings together multiple stakeholders, including the private sector and civil society, to enhance decision-making.