Maritime societies, fisheries law and institutions in the western Mediterranean. A summary of collective rights and decentralized systems of professional discipline.

This publication considers fisheries management policies in the Mediterranean in the light of the new objectives of sustainability and governance. Emphasis is put on the decentralization of public action and the reform of institutional mechanisms.The first chapter assesses the historical and societal bases of the dualism of small-scale fisheries and industrial fisheries. The dialectical relationship of power between these socio-economic categories is a result of arbitration by the public authorities that have entered into a spiral of interventionism. This has overturned the decentralized secular models of organization and regulation of fishing communities.The similarity of the legal frameworks governing access to fisheries, the statutes of the profession and the areas of intervention by the administration are considered in Chapter II.Chapter III looks at the institutional convergences between the countries of the region. The author identifies excessive administration and an ambivalence in the role of the professional organizations.The author also underlines the various initiatives aimed at rebuilding the communities’ principles of self-regulation, and questions the policy-makers’ capacity to commit themselves to policies of territorial allocation, as well as the communities’ capacity to fulfil a regulatory function enforceable in the industrial sector. Legal validation of the communities and their traditional rules of management over territories to be allocated would be a priority.