NGOs Securing Fisheries Environments: Understanding NGO-State Fisheries Protection Programs

The N-SAFE project examines the newly emerging role played by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as they partner with governments around the world in the global fight against illegal fishing. This is an important development, because if it works, such partnerships can transform the way we think about protecting our planet’s increasingly fragile oceanic ecosystem from illegal and unregulated overfishing. These joint NGO-state efforts to curb illegal fishing remain understudied. As a result, we know very little about: 1) the technical nature and content of these new NGO-state fisheries programs, 2) their effectiveness, impact, and possible replicability elsewhere, or 3) the political consequences of transferring law enforcement responsibility to an NGO—for governments and NGOs alike. Can NGOs play a productive role in fighting international illegal fishing on the high seas? Can volunteer-based maritime NGOs transition from ‘activist’ organizations into responsible and effective state partners? What are the political consequences of introducing an NGO into what is traditionally a law enforcement function of the state? In order to find answers to these questions, our team has conducted in-person meetings and interviews with government, military and law enforcement actors partnering with Sea Shepherd in Gabon, Italy and Benin. N-SAFE team has also conducted at-sea fieldwork and ship crew interviews on Sea Shepherd ships in a participant observation capacity in each of Gabon, Benin and Italy. The former work included N-SAFE Team participant observation of ship boarding inspections of numerous fishing vessels. N-SAFE has also interviewed Sea Shepherd management and current and former personnel across North America Europe, including but not limited to the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, France and United States. Following this fieldwork, N-SAFE has conducted a team meeting in Berlin and attended and presented a series of research papers at two international academic conferences: EISA 2023 Potsdam,Germany September 2023 and Radboud Conference on Earth System Governance in October 2023. Publication efforts of our work in an edited University Press volume is under way and expected in 2025.

Scientific impact: The project expanded our understanding of the coercive as well as diplomatic strategies used by NGO Sea Shepherd Global and various state-subsidiary branches of Sea Shepherd to reach their goals. We learned and will disseminate the tactics, operations and strategies used in a State-NGO fisheries protection partnerships. This knowledge can be used to share validated practices that can be disseminated internationally to all stakeholders in fisheries protection. N-SAFE learned how the NGO Sea Shepherd Global has direct input into the implementation of state policy and how it entrepreneurially creates fisheries actions and policies that become best practices that are enshrined into national law. Moreover, we demonstrate how Sea Shepherd also learns from the state partners, and acts as a collector and conduit of best practices across partner-state fisheries programs. Our findings will better allow governmental stakeholders to understand and anticipate the benefits as well as "political" control tradeoffs involved in such NGO-State partnerships, and how to effectively ensure state oversight and efficiency gains at every stage of a NGO partnership fisheries protection program. Our study of strategic change within Sea Shepherd Global and other Sea Shepherd organizations resulted in novel insights into the processes of radicalization and deradicalization of transnational environmental NGOs. This can help us understand the constraints and opportunities NGOs operate under when making policy decisions regarding their "core mission" and how this intersects with state and international law. Societal impact: Our study examines the effectiveness and impact of SSCS-state fisheries protection programs across various metrics: patrol numbers, vessel inspection rates, crime reduction, and arrests made. We also discovered unanticipated impacts, including the ability of Sea Shepherd to directly influence state law development and the ability to act as a diplomatic bridge between neighboring partner states co-cooperating in Sea Shepherd programs. These insights can inform any future decisions by Norwegian policy-makers and the international community whether to employ, fund, or otherwise support these emerging NGO-state partnering practices in the fight against the growing problem of the depletion of fish stocks and intensifying ecological pressure on marine resources worldwide.

Can non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play a productive role as a legitimate maritime capacity builder? Can a volunteer-based maritime NGO transition itself from an ‘activist’ organization into a responsible and effective state partner for fisheries management? What are the political consequences of introducing an NGO into what is traditionally a law enforcement function of the state? Most of the existing literature related to fisheries protection is focused on state actors, or collaboration between states (Hønneland, 2012). To the extent that the literature looks at NGO involvement in the politics of fisheries protection, the vast majority is focused on how NGOs rely on indirect lobbying efforts to impact the regulatory fisheries policies of states and international organizations (Price, 2003). The niche literature examining the role of non-state actors engaging in partnerships with states to manage state fisheries has, with some notable exceptions (Bondaroff, 2011, Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 2019), focused almost exclusively on state use of commercial maritime private security firms (Berube, Cullen 2012). This reveals a literature gap that ignores how the last five years have witnessed the NGO SSCS entering direct partnerships with governments to improve local enforcement of fisheries regulation. However, these NGO-state fisheries programs remain unexamined by academic literature. As a result, we know very little about: 1) the technical nature and content of these new NGO-state fisheries programs, 2) their effectiveness, impact, and possible replicability elsewhere, or 3) the political consequences that transferring law enforcement to an NGO has for both the governments involved and SSCS. Nor do we know how to 4) explain why SSCS and their state partners have changed their attitudes and behavior from one characterized by mutual mistrust towards a partnership that is mutually reinforcing and collaborative. The project seeks to address these four issues.