Arctic Review on Law and Politics, Vol 16, No 1, 2025, pp. 86-114.
Coastal states have a duty to cooperate on the management of transboundary (shared) fish stocks in order to prevent overexploitation of such stocks. In this article, we examine the history and current state of fisheries management in two European seas, the Barents Sea and the Black Sea, to find out how and why these fishing regions have ended up with widely contrasting management outcomes.
In the Barents Sea, the coastal states of Norway and Russia have jointly managed the fisheries for half a century with good results in terms of stock conservation. By contrast, the riparian states in the Black Sea – Bulgaria, Georgia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine – have struggled to coordinate their management efforts, and the stocks are heavily overfished.
We find that several factors help explain these differences. In both cases, the geopolitical context has been important. Geopolitical considerations have induced Norway and Russia/the Soviet Union to seek joint solutions for the Barents Sea fisheries, but in the Black Sea geopolitical rivalry has hampered cooperation. Russia, in particular, has been sceptical of joint management arrangements. In addition, Norway and Russia both have high stakes in the Barents Sea fisheries, and they share a long history of cooperation within multilateral fisheries institutions in the North-East Atlantic. The riparian states in the Black Sea have very unequal stakes in the fisheries, and there are considerable differences in their approaches to fisheries management. This is particularly so between Turkey – the biggest player – and the other riparian states.
