Van Hoof, L. 2010. Co-management: an alternative to enforcement? – ICES Journal of Marine Science, 67: 395–401. The decline in fish stocks worldwide has often been attributed to problems inherent with resources being treated as common property. Government is usually called upon to define and implement solutions, but the issues society face today cannot be dealt with by the classical, state-centred system of the industrial society. In this article, the Dutch case of fisheries management is used to demonstrate how a government-orientated solution, such as the recently inaugurated EU Community Fisheries Control Agency, and a governance-type solution, such as co-management, relate to each other and whether a partnership between government and the market, such as co-management, can serve as an alternative to direct government enforcement. Although the Dutch case is not a true-bred form of co-management, but rather a case of co-enforcement, it can be used to service a theoretical assessment of the possibilities of co-enforcement at a European scale.

A major challenge of future EU fisheries management is the integration of fisheries management with broader marine management. The focus on ecosystem based management is both a driver for regionalisation as for integration of policy to cover all sectors and activities at the scale of the marine ecosystem. The central question of this paper is: how are regionalisation and integration discourses in EU management of marine resources influencing the Integrated Maritime Policy, the Marine Strategy Framework Directive and the Common Fisheries Policy differently and which challenges arise because of these differences? We will look at the current model of governance applied and see whether this is durable in the longer term and analyse specifically the implications of integrated regional marine management. We will conclude that the process of regionalisation and integration of policy requires a further development of the marine governance system, positioning the regional level into the multi-level governance system.