Policy-making processes in the EU Common Fisheries Policy – communicational information learning and belief updating processes

The EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) fishing opportunity setting information processing has been shown to become more proportionate, converging between scientific recommendations as an incoming information signal and EU Council decisions on Total Allowable Catches, between the period of 1988-2012 (Princen et. al., 2020; Jones ad Baumgartner, 2005). This trend was expected to lead to a more sustainable outcome for EU fisheries, and especially with the 2013 reform of the EU CFP. However, many EU fish stock biomass – and specifically stocks in the Baltic Sea have deteriorated over the last decade, implying a policy failure despite expectations of sustainable outcomes. To resolve this paradox, we provide an in-depth empirical case study looking into two main questions. Firstly, we examined whether the post-2013 CFP reform induced and sustained the proportional information process Total Allowable Catch trends and whether incremental versus punctual changes were induced also by additional observational information signals such as annual catches, and stock biomass changes. Secondly, we analyzed whether the International Council for Exploration of the Seas (ICES) as an advice provider is indeed considered by stakeholders and policy-makers as an important opinion leader for belief updating. This was tested through a stakeholder network approach building on the theoretical basis of the communication learning process (Pappi and Henning, 1998, Hennig et al., 2017) to further establish causality between information-processing trends and policy-making changes. Data for this question was collected from a quantitative survey of political actors. Four stakeholder network categories were measured: reputation, information exchange, support, and social networks. This allows us to identify the perceived influence of stakeholders as information sources in CFP policy-making, through network multiplier calculations and estimate the extent of ICES influence, as well as identify other stakeholders who may be generating alternative information signals that impact the policy-making process.