Introduction: regionalising the Common Fisheries Policy

The idea of putting together a special issue of MAST on the issue of regionalisation of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), was born in late 2010. Having participated in an EU funded research project looking into how an eco-system based approach to fisheries management could be operationalised in the European Union (EU) with particular focus on regionalisation, we found that the coming reform of the CFP would be a good opportunity to make a substantial contribution on the topic of regionalisation, which we felt ought to be a central component of the reform discussions.