In 2017 more than a third of assessed fish stocks were being fished at a biologically unsustainable level. At the same time the rise of human population and people’s income, fisheries subsidies and technological advancement in the fishing industry have led to increased seafood consumption and a global depletion of fish stocks. Inadequate management is cited as an important cause for overexploited fish stocks and illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) and destructive fishing practices.

Indonesia suffers from considerable IUU fishing practices

Especially IUU fishing is seen as the biggest obstacle to sustainable global fisheries and posing a serious threat to marine ecosystems, global food security, local economies, state governance and local communities. ‘IUU fishing depletes fish populations that might otherwise be fished by legitimate actors. Consequently, it threatens global food security and has been identified by the UN as one of the seven threats to global maritime security,’ states political scientist Nilmawati who studied the persistence of IUU Fishing in Indonesia. ‘Indonesia, as an archipelagic country that is heavily reliant on its fisheries resources, unsurprisingly, suffers from considerable IUU fishing practices.’ To understand why illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing persists Nilmawati conducted an investigation into the effectiveness of multi-level natural resource governance in Indonesia. ‘The fragmentation of measures employed at different levels of governance is one of the key contributors to the persistence of IUU fishing in Indonesia’, she states.  

A novel analytical framework

Nilmawati develops a novel analytical framework which integrates the literature on international resource regime effectiveness with theories on multi-level governance. With this framework she captures variation in governance outputs and governance outcomes at different levels of analysis. Combining these perspectives also allows her to contribute to the existing literature on the different types of resource regime, and identify the determinants of regime effectiveness in different institutional settings and how they interact across scales.

An in-depth analysis of natural resource governance

On an empirical level, Nilmawati contributes by conducting an in-depth analysis of natural resource governance in the Global South. ‘My study redresses the international regime literature’s persisting “Northern bias”. It describes how the governance of illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing in Indonesia involves a plethora of different actors and measures.’

Based on extensive fieldwork, she reveals how governance effectiveness is not only dependent on the strength of monitoring and enforcement instruments. ‘Governance measures need to be appropriate, implementable and complementary to contribute to solving the problem on the ground.’ In the case of Indonesia, the effectiveness of the fisheries regime to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing is thereby shaped by the specific characteristics of the measures at each level of governance and their interplay across scales, both horizontally and vertically, concludes Nilmawati.

Nilmawati defended her dissertation 'The Persistence of IUU Fishing in Indonesia: A Multi-Level Governance Perspective' on 16 February at the University of Amsterdam