| Summary: | Most of the sea areas within the European Union are overfished and the catches are estimated to be up to five times lager then the amount to achieve a sustainable fishery. In doing so, the management of EU's marine resources comes to be questioned. The purpose of this study was to analyze EU's administration of marine fisheries and to explore which steps that can be undertaken to counteract the negative trend. The questions of the study were: How does the EU administrate today’s marine fishery recourses? And: How can the problem whit overfishing be discouraged? To answer these questions a comparative analyses were used to compare and evaluate administrative systems. A content analysis were also used on official documents. The fundamental problem is that the sea is a common resource and contains many users, which can cause overfishing. There is a lack of property rights, which lead to the tragedy of the commons because everybody has the right to use the recourses of the sea. When there is many users the individual’s contribution is “a drop in the ocean” and there is no motive for individual action. The study concluded that there were major problems with the current administration and that there were a strong conflict between conservation and exploitation. The total catch quota are set too high and it creates a situation whit a “race to the fish” to catch as many fish as possible before the quota is reached. Problems also arise because the EU has an ineffective regulation of the fishery that gives fisherman little freedom to act on. By creating property rights it sets a value on the resource that would provide a longer-term sustainable administration. Three management systems to create a rights-based management were analyzed which were the territorial use right in fisheries, local governance and individual transferable quotas. Of these, the individual transferable quotas were the most potential option. Though property rights can create an opportunity it does not solve the whole problem whit overfishing, some difficulties still remains such as the supply of public goods. If the current management is ongoing, the problem whit overfishing persists. Changing today’s administration to a rights-based management can lead to sustainability within the EU fisheries. Keywords: EU, Overfishing, property rights, Rights-based management.
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