Researching IUU: a fishy category?

Failures of international fisheries governance are often referred to as a category as IUU, or illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing. IUU has become a common default category, within both the academic and regulatory communities, for all these failures. At first glance, having a general category for situations in which international fisheries governance needs improvement might seem benign. But it poses real dangers as a generic research category. While it brings attention to issues that need further study, it also conflates a wide variety of different kinds of failures of governance. It risks suggesting to researchers that it makes sense to study illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing as a single category of activity. Studying IUU as an analytic construct rather than assuming it as a category helps to balance the tension faced by researchers between a holistic approach to addressing the challenges of international fisheries governance and the need to engage these challenges with the most effective analytical tools. The central argument of this chapter is that effective research into international fisheries governance requires the disaggregation of IUU as a category. Only then can researchers and policymakers trace the causes of and identify effective policy responses to failures of governance.