EU Common Fisheries Policy failure? Assessing the role of informational lobbying and policy belief updating processes

Since the foundation of the EU Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), and despite incremental progress, the policy continues to be criticized for failing to achieve its key objectives. Examining the underlying drivers of this inefficiency by applying an integrated non-cooperative bargaining model and a social network analysis, we show that although, individually, policy makers and other stakeholder organizations mostly prefer environmental goals, overfishing decisions are still an equilibrium outcome of the CFP key instrument. Theoretically, belief updating and policy learning processes should occur in the CFP stakeholder network through lobbying. However, empirically, communicational lobbying is only partially explaining the outcomes of this collective action problem. Therefore, beyond communication lobbying, biased initial beliefs of decision makers on how specific policy measures impact environmental outcomes constitutes a central cause of ineffective decisionmaking. These biases are further shaped by oversimplified narratives, which act as barriers for achieving the EU green and blue transition.