Rebuilding overfished fish stocks is a challenging task with which governments have had mixed success. The time between “overfished” to “rebuilt” is a transition period managed by a rebuilding plan whose effectiveness is strongly influenced by distributional issues. Stock rebuilding is a targeted biological objective, but the process of rebuilding is an economic one that embodies allocation and distribution. Just as distributional issues influence the policy choices that lead to overfishing, they also shape the strategies employed to rebuild overfished stocks. Distributional issues are embedded in the management context, history, structures and processes of a fishery and through these, influence the identification and implementation of a rebuilding strategy.