Garrett Hardin’s seminal essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) crystallized the economic dilemma inherent when man exploits common natural resources. Self-restraint will ensure a longer-term enjoyment of the assets but, with access freely open to all, there is little to induce any single participant to curb his own activities. The inevitable tendency towards over-harvesting and premature exhaustion has led to the modern demand for various forms of legal or quasi-legal regulation. At one end of the spectrum one has seen the formation of voluntary, self-regulating clubs of the main exploiting bodies, as with the establishment of the International Whaling Commission in 1946. The converse response has been the unilateral extension of national sovereign rights by coastal states over increasingly large areas of adjacent waters, a process initiated by Latin American countries over 40 years ago but greatly intensified in the 1960s after the failure of the Geneva Conferences to provide satisfactory solutions. However, other models exist, and a more recent and legally more sophisticated example is found in the regulatory regime for fisheries developed within the European Economic Community, the subject of Robin Churchill’s study.

Around 9% of the world marine catch lies in the waters of the EEC, and its fleet as a whole has the world’s third largest fishery-catching power after Japan and the USSR. Yet, as Churchill points out, the economic importance of fishing within the Community is relatively minor, employing around 1% of its labour force, and contributing to well below 1% of the Community’s gross domestic product. Given these figures, why, one may ask, has such pol-