Institutional and Ideational Features of Canadian-US Fishery Management Networks: Connectivity, Coherence, and Collaboration

Abstract

This article examines fishery management along and across the Canadian-US border through the comparison of collaborative transboundary networks in four regions: the Salish Sea, the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Maine, and the northern region including the Gulf of Alaska and the Hecate Strait. Transnational fishery management is an inter-organizational and multi-jurisdictional enterprise constituted by shared understandings of a suite of tasks and by communications among the participants. We use survey data to summarize the inter-organizational scale and participation in the networks, the centrality of different organization types, the factors that contribute to network formation, other ideational network traits like inter-organizational trust and risk perception, the activities that actors engage in to facilitate transboundary collaboration, and the influence of binational organizations. We show that the networks managing marine fisheries exhibit binodal organizational clustering along national boundaries, but the freshwater Great Lakes fishery has a more transnational multi-nodal network. These fishery binational management networks are brought together by regulatory dependencies and shared ideas about who should be involved, despite perceived risks between Canadian and US government agencies and a lack of trust in the political system to ensure fairness. When present, binational fishery commissions can facilitate collaboration by framing issues on an ecosystem scale and exercising their convening power.