ABSTRACT
As I indicated in chapter 3, there is no centralized and formally organized public authority in the international system. Although this might lead us to ignore or deemphasize the role of institutionalized compliance mechanisms in this sociopolitical system, it would be a mistake to do so. In this chapter, I want to examine in some depth the operation of decentralized institutions in efforts to achieve compliance in the international system. I have chosen a compliance system associated with the marine fisheries of the North Pacific as a vehicle for this examination. The pertinent prescriptions deal with the international relations of resource management, a topic of growing importance in the contemporary world. The decentralized institutions introduced in conjunction with this compliance system are sufficiently complex to illustrate a variety of aspects of decentralized compliance mechanisms. And the institutions in question have been in existence long enough to make this case a rich one for this study. 1
