John Dewey (1927) was one of the first to make a case that there is no a priori or pre-formed entity called ‘the public’. He argued that ‘the public’, or ‘publics’ as we will later call them, only comes into being around specific issues. That is to say, publics are spontaneous coalitions of citizens who all have an interest in, or suffer the ill effects of, common problems. As Noortje Marres (2005), drawing on Dewey's work, succinctly puts it, if there is ‘no issue, [then there is] no public’. More specifically, Dewey claims that publics are called into being when a group of individuals becomes aware of how the incidental effects of human activities affect them collectively: ‘Indirect, extensive, enduring and serious consequences of conjoint and interacting behaviour call a public into existence having a common interest in controlling these consequences’ (Dewey, 1927, p 126).

The case of fisheries governance in the European Union (EU) suggests that, following Dewey, the public is indeed a constituted phenomenon. For, as this chapter will show, in fisheries the ‘public interest’ is only manifested at times of crisis, that is, when there are issues at stake. Mikalsen and Jentoft (2001, p 282) explain that in the past, when there was:

While this statement asserts that today's so-called fisheries ‘crisis’ does indeed arouse public interest, it also suggests that this interest was latent for some time prior to being realised. The vast majority of the environmental politics literature assumes the presence of a single public interest around environmental issues that is a priori and fixed through time. However, there have been some exceptions. Michael Mason's work, for instance, describes how different ‘affected publics’ are produced by different environmental catastrophes (Mason, 2005). Similarly, Noortje Marres’ research draws on Dewey to consider the various publics produced by different environmentally controversial technologies (Marres, 2007).