Undermining the Integrated Maritime Policy

The European Union’s Integrated Maritime Policy is intended in part to co-ordinate sectoral policies, to achieve joined-up thinking and action and overcome the inconsistency between policy approaches that has led to the degradation of European seas. An integrated governance would be relatively straight-forward if the different interests and actors were operating on the basis of shared values, but they are not. While the fisheries sector, whether large or small-scale, is driven by a commercial imperative which tends towards the greatest extraction of the resource possible, environmentalists would champion the removal of all human impacts, other than redress activity, as the optimum state for the ecosystem. However, the greatest impediment to an integrated approach is the failure to subject the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy to the objectives of the Integrated Maritime Policy. Instead, all decisions concerning fisheries will continue to be made in accordance with the Fisheries Regulation which demands exploitation of the fragile resource. Attention needs to be given to how EU fisheries policy is to acquire values beyond that of commercial extraction for immediate economic benefit so that it may cohere with objectives of the Integrated Maritime Policy and aid the regeneration of the seas.