Fisheries, Pollution, and Canadian-American Transnational Relations

In this essay I suggest a newcomer to the list of types of transnational relationship discussed in this volume. This is the relationship that arises from the use of a common-property natural environment. These relations are not new, of course, and have led to conflict and accommodations at various levels for centuries, as Innis's work on the codfisheries testifies. As world population grows and technology broadens, both demand and capacity to exploit these international common property resources in ways that will harm other users have also increased. Yet international law has not been able to devise rights of tenure for international property as efficient as those for, say, agricultural land. This resulting lack of suitable concepts of ownership (or sovereignty) has, therefore, been one source of the loss of control by central governments that is frequently mentioned in the transnational relations literature.