The experience of many countries strongly suggests that bad governments and institutions have been a serious, if not the most serious, obstacle to economic growth and industry-structural adjustments. All public sectors pursue a mix of both predatory and productive activities-bad governments emphasizing the former, while good governments finding a way of promoting the later. In fishery public policy studies, much confusion exists about the roles of policy illustration and prescription. In general fishery public sectors involve collective actions by numerous individuals under conditions of uncertainty, complexity, bounded rationality, and imperfect information structure. All collective fisheries action organizations consist of a center(e.g., government), which leads fishery group actions, and peripheral participants(e.g., fishermen), which are controlled by the government. A paradigm is developed that gives both theoretical and empirical meaning to the constitutional determination of fisheries political preference function or fishery public sector governance structures. Three relevant spaces are specified: policy instrument, results, and constitutional. The collective-choice rules of the constitutional space structure the tradeoff between public and special fishery interest groups. Fishery public sectors seeking sustainable reductions in wasteful rent-seeking fishing activities should select constitutional principles and institutional structures that tend to promote resource sustainability. In particular, the effects of internal and external events on fisheries may result in a greater or lesser concentration of interest group power. Thus, the structure of the fishereis political power must be assessed in any prescriptive evaluation of alternative fishery governance weights.