Rethinking sustainable fisheries: The realist paradigm

Current approaches to the regulation of fisheries revolve around attempts to police biologically defined limits. Such approaches are inappropriate and unsuccessful. The inbuilt tendencies of the fishing industry will be to transgress such limits and to perpetuate a condition of unsustainability. Using insights from realism and regulation theory, the paper explores the causes of unsustainability and seeks to demonstrate the need for fisheries policy to target the structures and mechanisms that underlie the tendency for unsustainability.