Co-management and Communities in the Barents Sea Fisheries

The aim of the present chapter is to discuss the extent to which it proves meaningful to apply co-management theory in explaining compliance with regulations among fishermen in the Barents Sea.1 Moreover, the results arrived at so far in the investigation are used to further study the relationship between the concepts of co-management, communities and compliance. An attempt is made to provide an explanation in line with McCay & Jentoft’s (1998) call for thicker descriptions in studies of the commons, taking into account the embeddedness of management systems in more general social systems.2