The recent emergence of bottom trawling as a method of fishing in global oceans and, especially, on the high seas beyond national jurisdiction, poses a strong threat to the sustainable use of oceanic marine resources.  Moreover, the maintenance of biological diversity on the high seas is significantly impeded by this mode of fish harvesting.  While international treaties such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Convention on Biological Diversity provide an umbrella framework under which corrective policies directed toward this problem might be pursued, effective resource-sustaining policies have not been forthcoming.  The primary obstacle to policy success has been the inherent absence of sovereign decision-making authority in the "supranational" geographical space that constitutes the high seas.  Consequently, the existing supranational governance framework has been seriously inadequate for achieving the sustainable utilization of marine resources, and the maintenance of biological diversity, on the high seas inclusive of the deep seabed. 

The present paper examines the important new policy regime initiated formally during May 2007 to address the bottom-trawling fishing problem in the South Pacific Region of the high seas, which took the form of an agreement between twenty nations to establish a Regional Fisheries Management Organization (RFMO) for the area.  The paper provides an analysis of the critical dimensions of the problem, and possible policies for its solution, as they interact with each other within the relevant disciplines of microeconomics, public economics, environmental economics, and international law. Section I demonstrates the nature and magnitude of the resource sustainability and biological diversity issues.  This is followed in Section II by a demonstration of how the absence of sovereign supranational decision-making authority contribues to the current policy impasse.  Section III concludes with an examination of the policy approach being pursued by the newly-founded South Pacific RFMO, including the significant obstacles that it faces in the existing political world where supranational governance decisions are made in a decentralized manner via international treaties between sovereign nations -- in the absence of supranational property rights and direct control over the geographical area in question.  Second-best policy approaches that might be adopted within this constraint are considered.