This volume on fisheries governance is the result of collaboration between academics and practitioners from around the world. For over three years, thirty fisheries professionals from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds shared their experiences, ideas and concerns, and gathered together at regular intervals to develop what they felt was a new approach to the problems and opportunities that beset fisheries and aquaculture. This endeavour was generously supported by the European Commission by way of its programme for development cooperation (INCODEV, project number ICA4-CT-2001-10038).

The FISHGOVFOOD network, as it came to be known, was particularly concerned with the situation of countries in the South. Not only are substantial parts of their populations dependent on capture fisheries and aquaculture for a living, fish also play an important role in their food security. While recognising the special status of fisheries in the South, the network also took care to emphasise basic similarities in the workings of the ‘fish chain’ in North and South, and in the governance of fisheries, in various geographical regions.

Basing itself on an understanding of developments in the fisheries field, the network's source of intellectual inspiration lay elsewhere. One of the newly elaborated perspectives in governance theory – known as interactive governance – appeared particularly relevant. First, its two points of departure – the increasing diversity, complexity, dynamics and differences of scale among the fisheries systems-to-be-governed, and the notion that governance is not a task of government alone – matched with the network members’ understanding of developments in fisheries. More fundamentally, however, they felt that interactive governance theory provided an alternative framework for understanding the current state of affairs, and the new directions that could be explored.

One of the conditions for making a conceptual advance is the integration of social, economic, and ecological insights and the bridging of disciplinary gaps. This requires a propensity for what Wilson (1998:8) has called consilience, ‘a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and factbased theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation’. One of the fact-based concepts utilized by the FISHGOVFOOD network for this purpose is the ‘fish chain’.