As the preceding chapters of this section have demonstrated, resource regulation has not been the strong suit of fisheries. Each chapter has identified serious problems of, or challenges to, governance in the world's fisheries: overfishing, human-induced ecosystem shifts, threats to livelihoods, pollution, over-dependence on marine sources of fish feed, and quality control. These are well-known problems that have in recent years prompted increasing recognition that fisheries governance has been inadequate to the challenge of maintaining sustainability and livelihoods in maritime areas.

While not excusing governance failures, the preceding chapters have provided a major reason for them: the diversity, complexity, and dynamics of the main segments of the fish chain that we identify militate against the establishment of straightforward, effective governance mechanisms. This task is rendered even more complex when the attempt is made to incorporate all of the segments of the chain into a whole. The intent of this chapter is to reflect on the constitution of the fish chain or, really, the multiple intertwined fish chains that extend from the world's fisheries, and then to assess the governance challenges specific to governing the interactions within entire fish chains. Both of these tasks have been anticipated in the introductory chapters to this volume and in this section of the book. We begin this chapter with a short reflection on the representation of the chain.

How Should the Fish Chain Be Viewed?

Two explicit approaches and one implicit approach to representing the fish chain have been taken thus far. The first of these, most consistent with the metaphorical image of the chain, is the notion of a vertical, interlinked sequence of interactions that brings an aquatic organism from its ecosystem to the consumer's dining table (fig. 1 in the introduction to Part II). The second is the more complex, multi-layered image of the chain represented in the diagram in fig. 2 (in the introduction to Part II). For now, we will content ourselves with the descriptions of approaches one and two as presented in the introductory chapter to this section. Later in this chapter, we will return to their importance as images for understanding the chain.

The third, implicit, approach is that, in order to grasp the complexity of the chain one has to break it into constituent segments in order to view each more closely.