Creating Legal Teeth for Toothfish: Using the Market to Protect Fish Stocks in Antarctica

Policies to protect Antarctic and Patagonian Toothfish in theSouthern Ocean are failing. Contests over sovereignty, the needfor international decisions to be approved by consensus, inabilityto physically patrol the Southern Ocean, and the political vacuumcreated by the designation of the ‘high seas’ haveeach contributed to an overfishing crisis in the Southern Oceanand Antarctica. After documenting the contours of this fishingcrisis and explaining how international law is unable to preventit, this article proposes a fundamental shift in strategy awayfrom supply-side controls that require a presence in Antarcticawhere the overfishing occurs. Lawmakers must utilise more rigorousdemand-side measures if Toothfish stocks are to be preservedand allowed to recover.     

The formation of an international environmental agreement as a two-stage exclusive cartel formation game with transferable utilities

We construct a two-stage exclusive cartel formation game with utility transfers to model the formation process of an international environmental agreement. Our results show that in the first stage of low degree of consensus, engaging in utility transfers by asymmetric countries will accomplish little. In contrast, in the second stage of higher degree of consensus, it is more likely for asymmetric countries to engage in monetary transfers to form the grand coalition, particularly if a small stable coalition has already been formed in the first stage. This article therefore provides a theoretical perspective to explain why it is more likely for some developed countries to initiate an IEA formation process by forming a small stable coalition first before engaging in monetary transfers to form the grand coalition with all the other countries. Such a perspective is consistent with the historical development of the Montreal Protocol and may also explain the difficulty for asymmetric countries to form the grand coalition at the beginning of the IEA formation process of the Kyoto Protocol.