This article enquires into why the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the Fish Stocks Agreement have failed to provide an adequate legal framework for effective management of high-seas living resources. This failure is due to the nature of the international legal framework that requires signatories only to “cooperate” but how to cooperate remains a choice variable. The result is that if it suits them, signatories take ‘reservations’ (e.g., on whether to abide by catch quotas in Regional Fisheries Management Organizations) with the effect that they continue to ‘play’ non-cooperatively. It is argued that environmental groups, such as Greenpeace, have an important role to play in aligning moral precepts and one day, perhaps, creating a coordination game between fishing nations in which ‘reservations’ are no longer taken.

JEL Code: K3.