¹ Consensus on mutual recognition of two-hundred-mile EEZs was reached at the the Third Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC) in Caracus, Venezuela, in 1974. LOSC was ratified in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on September 24, 1982.

² See mainstream feature articles such as “Survey of the Sea,” Economist, May 23,1998Google Scholar; and “Hook, Line and Extinction,” Business Week, December 14,1998Google Scholar. For an overview of the collapse of the Grand Banks cod fishery, see Finlayson, A. Christopher and McCay, Bonnie J., “Crossing the Threshold of Ecosystem Resilience: The Commercial Extinction of Northern Cod,” in Berkes, Fikret and Folke, Carl, eds., Linking Social and Ecological Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

³ Eckert, Ross D., The Enclosure of Ocean Resources (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institute Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Royce, William F., Fishery Development (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁴ Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, State of World Fisheries and Agriculture (Rome: FAO, SOFIA, 2000)Google Scholar; data available through www,fao.org/fi. How these indicators would have fared in the absence of EEZs remains to be seen. It is quite possible they would have been worse.

⁵ Hardin, Garrett, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (December 1968), 1243–48Google Scholar.

⁶ North, Douglass, Structure and Change in Economic History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981)Google Scholar.

⁷ Keohane, , “Governance in a Partially Globalized World” (Presidential address, American Political Science Association, 2000Google Scholar; published in American Political Science Review 95 (March 2001)Google Scholar.

⁸ Knight, Jack, Institutions and Social Conflict (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ Bates, Robert H., “Contra Contractarianism: Some Reflections on the New Instirutionalism,” Politics and Society 16 (June 1988), 387–401CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Krasner, Stephen“Global Communications and National Power: Life on the Pareto Frontier,” World Politics 43 (April 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰ Stein, Arthur“Coordination and Collaboration: Regimes in an Anarchic World,” International Organization 36 (October 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; reprinted in Krasner, Stephen, International Regimes (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Snidal, Duncan“Cooperation versus Prisoner's Dilemma: Implications for International Cooperation and Regimes,” American Political Science Review 79 (December 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Snidal acknowledges the possibility of bargaining problems within graduated PD games. He does not seem fully to explore the implications of this, however. The distributive implications of international cooperation issues do, in fact, emerge at the forefront of IR literature in the late 1980s and the early 1990s in the form of the relative gains debate; see Baldwin, David, Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar. But the emphasis on relative gains concerned the degree to which asymmetries in cooperative benefits deter cooperation for security reasons. Marginalized in this debate were questions concerning distributive conflicts driven by the incentive to maximize absolute, rather than relative gains.

¹³ Schelling, Thomas, Micromotives and Macrobehavior (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979)Google Scholar; and Hardin, Russell, Collective Action (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Fearon, James, “Bargaining, Enforcement and International Cooperation,” International Organization 52 (Spring 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁵ See especially Libecap, Gary, Contracting for Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar. The argument is consistent with that of most new institutional economics scholars who identify themselves as contractarians.

¹⁶ Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Brennan, Geoffrey and Buchanan, James M., The Reason of Rules (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. See also Buchanan, James M. and Tullock, Gorden, The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ This latter qualification begins to shift away from Buchanan's argument and revert toward that of Rawls; that is, when a risk-averse person does not know what role he or she will occupy in the future, he or she will likely prefer rules that enhance social welfare and generate equitable outcomes.

¹⁹ On integrative versus distributive bargaining, see Sebenius, James K., “Challenging Conventional Explanations of International Cooperation: Negotiations Analysis and the Case of Epistemic Communities,” International Organization 46 (Winter 1992), 323CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Young, Oran, “The Politics of International Regime Formation: Managing Natural Resources and the Environment,” International Organization 43 (Summer 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Knight (fn. 8), 44–47.

²¹ Koremenos, Barbara“Loosening the Ties That Bind: A Learning Model of Agreement Flexibility,” International Organization 55 (Spring 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² At the local level, Elinor Ostrom's discussion of appropriators' trial-and-error approach to institutional change seems consistent with these claims; see Ostrom, , Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ An anonymous reviewer has observed that the arguments of Fearon and Koremenos are not strictly complementary; that is, Koremenos's emphasis on learning and flexibility may mollify the intractable bargaining stances Fearon associates with long shadows of the future.

²⁴ Barzel also argues against the claim that more precision is always desirable, but his justification for imperfectly delineated rights rests on the costliness of rights specification. My justification rests on uncertainty about future roles and distributive outcomes that will result from rights specification. See Barzel, Yoram, Economic Analysis of Property Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

²⁵ Holm, Petter, Ranes, Stein A., and Hersoug, Bjorn, “Political Attributes of Rights-Based Management Systems: The Case of Individual Vessel Quotas in the Norwegian Coastal Cod Fishery,” in Symes, David, ed., Property Rights and Regulatory Systems in the Fisheries (Oxford: Fishing News Books, 1998)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Apostle, Richard et al. , Community, State and Market on the North Atlantic Rim: Challenges to Modernity in Fisheries (Toronto: University or Toronto Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁷ Grafton, R. Quentin, Squires, Dale, and Kirkley, James E., “Private Property Rights and Crises in World Fisheries: Turning the Tide?” Contemporary Economic Policy 14, no. 4 (1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ McCay, Bonnie, “Social and Ecological Implications of ITQs: An Overview,” Ocean and Coastal Management 28, no. 1–3 (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ My usage of the term “privatization” refers to the specification of exclusive access rights awarded to individual actors for the right to harvest a predetermined quota offish. Few if any cases involve private ownership of actual fish. Domestic law in most coastal states precludes ownership of marine resources.

³² Innis, Harold A.The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940)Google Scholar; and Kurlansky, Mark, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Penguin Books, 1997)Google Scholar.

³³ Iceland's peculiar structure has been attributed to its geography and its wide distribution of good fishing grounds around the island in contrast to its historically poor communications and transportation infrastructure on land. See Arnason, Ragnar, The Icelandic Fisheries: Evolution and Management of a Fishing Industry (Oxford: Fishing News Books, 1995)Google Scholar.

³⁴ The Independence Party is the most conservative of Iceland's political parties.

³⁵ Effort quotas usually involve restrictions on the number of days at sea.

³⁶ Hannes H. Gissurarson “The Politics of Enclosures” (Paper presented at Fishrights 99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, November 1999).

³⁷ In addition to geographic restrictions on transferability, quotas could not be transferred independently of the vessels to which they were allocated. To acquire ITQ shares, ITQ vessels had to be purchased as well.

³⁸ Recent legal challenges, however, have raised questions about the compatibility of fisheries privatization with the Icelandic constitution.

³⁹ Apostle et al. (fn. 26).

⁴⁰ Norway splits the overall TAC for this stock with Russia.

⁴¹ Holm, Ranes, and Hersoug (fn. 25).

⁴² Ibid. Partially exclusive rights refer to a situation where individual vessels are awarded a maximum quota of which only a portion is guaranteed. The nonguaranteed portion is subject to within-group competition.

⁴³ Holm, Petter“The Dynamics of Institutionalization: Transformation Processes in Norwegian Fisheries” Administrative Sciences Quarterly 40 (September 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ The task force was chaired by Michael Kirby, Trudeau's secretary to the cabinet on federal provincial relations, and the final report became known as the Kirby Report.

⁴⁵ Kirby, Michael J., Navigating Troubled Waters: A New Policy for the Atlantic Fisheries (Kirby Report) (Ottawa: Canadian Government Publishing Center, 1983)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Blades, Kent, Net Destruction: The Death of Atlantic Canada's Fishery (Halifax: Nimbus Publishing, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ Charles, Anthony T.“Fisheries Management in Atlantic Canada” Ocean and Coastal Management 35, no. 2–3 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁸ Blades (fn. 46).

⁴⁹ Finlayson, Alan C., Fishing for Truth: A Sociological Analysis of Northern Cod Stock Assessments from 1977–1990 (St. John's: ISER/Memorial University, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ For a journalistic account of the tragedy, see Harris, , Lament for an Ocean: The Collapse of the Atlantic Cod Fishery (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁵¹ Charles (fn. 47). Newfoundlands recovery has been the slowest.

⁵² Burke, D. L. and Brander, G. L., “Canadian Experience with Individual Transferable Quotas” (Paper presented at Fishrights 99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, November 1999)Google Scholar; Peacock, F. G and Hansen, J., “Community Management: Challenges and Opportunities” (Paper presented at Fishrights 99 Conference, Fremantle, Western Australia, November 1999)Google Scholar.

⁵³ Burke and Brander (fn. 52); Peacock and Hansen (fn. 52).

⁵⁴ An anonymous reviewer has noted that the earlier theoretical discussion on political contracting draws from Rawls's (fn. 16) and Buchanan's writings (fn. 17) on “true constitutive and constitutional settings” in contrast to regime formation in small-scale and global arenas with existing political cleavages and foundations, as in the case with property rights in fisheries. The possibility is acknowledged that these different contexts may lead to different impacts of uncertainty on distributive versus integrative bargaining.