Moving from Words to Action – Innovative Collaborative Partnerships to Combat IUU Fishing

One of the key challenges for MCS is effective communication, cooperation, and coordination - within countries, between countries, among regional regimes and with civil society. Recent developments in the fight against IUU fishing indicate that there is broad commitment to advance regional and global approaches to MCS and to establish greater public-private partnerships. At a national level, countries are developing mechanisms that support improved inter-agency cooperation and coordination, for example between fisheries agencies, customs and tax authorities, navy and coast guard, and the police and prosecuting authorities.

Cooperative partnerships provide countries with pathways for the development of larger coalitions of private sector resources, including technology, data, policy groups and other civil organizations that work collaboratively to achieve shared goals. These public-private partnerships facilitate the provision of analytical and MCS capacity building support to developing countries, especially those that take an active approach to addressing IUU fishing.

We have developed an agenda for the GFETW around several themes and presentations have been grouped under relevant focus areas. We have worked to prepare an agenda that is focused on sharing the initiatives and experiences of our members and observers. We have prioritised presentations from those that work at the forefront of MCS, compliance and enforcement to the greatest extent possible. We are working with presenters to ensure that presentations are relevant to our fisheries MCS, compliance and enforcement community and achieve the training intent of the Workshop. Each theme and focus area will be wrapped up by a panel discussion that will provide the opportunity for direct engagement between presenters and participants, and we are very keen to promote and facilitate robust group discussions. We will be using an app during the Workshop to promote interactive engagement across the agenda and participants can provide their questions on an ongoing basis using the app.

Participants will be encouraged to engage in open and robust discussions and highlight the key issues and the best ways to address these issues. As training Workshop for MCS officers there will be several targeted sessions for MCS officers on key fisheries MCS, compliance and enforcement skills and tradecraft.

We expect some small updates to the agenda as the Workshop approaches and will release the final agenda on July 27.