The Dutch fisheries sector and the North Sea Accord: Unpacking stakeholder participation in multi-levelled marine governance

Integrated, participatory forms of marine governance can form a basis of stakeholder support on which to base increasingly complex marine planning efforts, in the EU and beyond. Yet such stakeholder support is often the product of a constellation of external factors at the local, national and international level as well as of the internal organisation of a given interest group. This paper presents a qualitative study of an outlier case, examining the question why the Dutch fisheries sector was the only involved interest group which was unable to give its full support to the 2020 North Sea Accord. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with participants in the Dutch North Sea Accord negotiation, ratification and implementation process as well as with representatives of local fisheries organisations, the authors identified crucial factors which contributed to the division within the sector over the ratification of the Accord. Such factors include perceived inconsistencies in the double closure to conventional fisheries of both wind parks and marine protected areas, disagreements over the practical aspects of the transition fund and the decommissioning scheme, and varying degrees in which Brexit influenced local fisheries organisations. More fundamentally, a parallel, equally multileveled division within the Dutch fisheries sector over the desirability of participatory marine governance at the national level was identified. Such findings demonstrate the importance of understanding not just a given (marine) policymaking process, but also participants therein, in their own multileveled context, in order to explain a particular policy outcome or functioning of a given marine governance structure.