Hard and soft governance in the EU Common Fisheries Policy – a stakeholder network perspective for a green transition.

The 2013 EU Common Fisheries (CFP) reform was aimed at improving marine life status and achieving sustainable fisheries outcomes by 2020. This policy has not yet been fully implemented and its outcomes have not been accomplished despite the existence of institutions, both soft and hard governance tools including stakeholder participatory processes, and given that the EU has an exclusive competence mandate on fishing opportunity setting. The process of an ecological transition through the European Green Deal (EGD) policy aims to attain a climate neutrality outcome, safeguard of EU's biodiversity in land and sea, as well as the health and well-being of citizens from environment-related risks and impacts. In order to achieve a better status of EU waters and contribute to the EGD goals through cross-sectoral policy integration, it is essential to better understand why the CFP has not been able to stop overfishing in EU waters, and what could be achieved in the coming decade. We intend to provide an in-depth empirical case study examining the CFP through a multilevel stakeholder network approach (Pappi and Henning, 1998; Henning et al. 2019), focused on EU waters. A quantitative survey methodology was deployed to capture supra-national and national stakeholders' perceptions and visions of 2030 (i) goals of the CFP, (ii) achievement indicators, and (iii) optimal policy instrument mix. In addition, stakeholder coordination, collaboration, and cooperation were measured to determine the centrality of the network. Data was collected on four network categories: reputation, information exchange, support, and social networks. This paper will focus on the information network, and address stakeholders’ preferences on crosscutting policy goals and policy instruments of the CFP, which can be viewed in parts as experimentalist governance (Rangoni and Zeitlin, 2022). Interestingly, stakeholders’ preferences analysis shows the acknowledgment of the environmental and specifically biodiversity concerns and its necessary integration into the CFP. Against this backdrop of positive responses on environmental goals, stakeholder preferences on achievement indicators and choice of policy instruments aimed at sustainable fishing such as quota management Council regulations (Maximum Sustainable Yield) varied among stakeholders, making choices that could lead to overfishing implications. In order to solve this paradox, the paper links stakeholder preferences on policy instruments and goals to network clusters and multipliers. Our work provides insights into whether the current policy failure is rooted solely in institutional governance – stakeholder power imbalance, a joint decision trap (Scharf 1988) of hard governance, and policy instrument mix failure, or if it is also rooted in weak soft governance structures such as suboptimal communication networks and biased stakeholders’ beliefs on policy impacts. It will be one of the first to examine the CFP from a network perspective, to better understand the state and non-state actors' beliefs and perceptions, will thus aim to inform the implementation of the EGD for maximizing both cross-sectorial integrated policy outcomes and also strengthening soft governance institutions.