Regionalisation of International Whale Management: The North Atlantic Committee for Research on Marine Mammals

Abstract

"A major research field in international political science is the establishment and change of international regimes, of which resource regimes is a subcategory. The development of international regimes in the case of whaling is particularly interesting, as there is a long history of international whale management, dating back to 1931. Moreover, the 1946 whaling convention was at that time an innovative organizational setup for the handling of an international common property problem. The organization failed to manage the Antarctic whale resource properly until the second half of the 1960s when the organization entered an interesting period of scientific management. From the late 1970s the organization has turned gradually into a protectionist body, where many of the actors involved will not allow for any kind of whaling, regardless of the state of whale stocks. As it has become abundantly clear that whale stocks can sustain harvesting, the north Atlantic nations have established their own institutional framework for cooperation on research on marine mammals. This regime represents an institutional diversification which is interesting both in terms of its political ramifications and its institutional capability to handle complex resource management problems in a more multi-species oriented approach than the IWC can, and with regard to its legal status vis-a-vis the IWC. As for the latter, the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention is of particular interest."