The Performance of Exclusive Economic Zones (PEEZ)

Abstract

"The acknowledgment and formal establishment of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), largely during the 1970s and 1980s, brought more than a third of the world's oceans under the jurisdiction of coastal states, thus introducing one of the most far-reaching institutional changes in international society of the twentieth century. Today, more than one hundred EEZs are in force, covering virtually all continental shelf resources and most of the world's fisheries.

"The Scientific Steering Committee of the international project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC) has decided to launch a program of studies dealing with the consequences of this institutional change through the Performance of Exclusive Economic Zones (PEEZ) framework outlined in this scoping report. The objective of PEEZ is to contribute to our understanding of the roles that institutions play in global environmental change and, more specifically, to address IDGEC's focus on the reasons why some institutional responses to environmental problems prove more effective than others (IDGEC 1999). Through a systematic investigation of the performance of the EEZs in terms of sustainability, efficiency, governance, and knowledge, PEEZ aims to enhance our understanding of the ways institutions work in practice, a matter of substantial interest to the policy community as well as the science community.

"PEEZ does not seek to assess all the consequences associated with the creation of EEZs. Rather, it highlights the performance of EEZs with regard to living marine resources, and grants priority to IDGEC's core regions: the Circumpolar North and Southeast Asia. The purpose of this scoping report is to spell out a set of key science questions regarding the performance of EEZs and to identify analytic procedures and data sets as well as organizational matters relevant to this research program."