The four chapters in Part III depict institutional mechanisms and challenges in fisheries at the global, national, and local level and their interconnections. Fisheries governance and food security involve institutions at all levels and require vertically and horizontally co-ordinated and structured linkages. The diversity, complexity, and dynamics of fisheries institutions provide targets that are obscure and moving. Fisheries governance is thus a never-ending process that requires institutions that are robust and flexible. What these institutions should be like is in itself an important governance issue with no easy answers. But what are institutions? What exactly do they do?

Institutions are the instrument through which the formation and execution of fisheries governance occurs. The design and workings of institutions are key issues. As instruments they can be effective, fitting, legitimate, and socially just to various extents. From a governance perspective, they need to be continually evaluated and adapted to changing circumstances. Governors should always relate to institutions, as should the stakeholders who experience their impact. Institutions are obviously social constructs and they are the outcome of human experience, foresight and ingenuity. They introduce structure, order, and predictability into human relations and interactions. Without institutions, social actors would not know how to interact and would not know what is expected of them or what they can expect of others. As March and Olsen (1995) argue, institutions provide ‘a logic of appropriateness’ that comes with rights, routines, roles, responsibilities, agendas, standards, and practices that enable the people confronted with them to distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil, normal and abnormal, and natural and unnatural. Since they need to be recognised by everyone affected by them, institutions also come with meanings and interpretations.

Among academics, the institution is a concept with many definitions. It is one of the terms used by scholars and the general public alike and the two do not always perceive it in quite the same way. Perceptions of what institutions do and what their potentials are can vary. In a sense, how we perceive these specific institutions determines what fisheries governors can and should do. If institutions are narrowly defined, the ideas on what they can do are similarly narrow, and a broad perception of institutions includes a more comprehensive repertoire of mechanisms, incentives, and designs. If institutions are defined as ‘rules’ of conduct (cf. North 1990), governors emphasise the legal aspects of institutions.