Social robustness is a neglected but crucial component of fisheries management. We present a conceptual framework for evaluating social robustness and we apply it to the analysis of four case studies. We understand social robustness to be a combination of two factors that allow a management regime to adapt to a broad range of potential ecological, economic and political situations: acceptance by stakeholders, reflected in how they perceive and respond to management, and capacity for institutional learning, the process in which institutions change in reaction to internal or external socio-economic or ecological pressures. We apply five hypotheses about social robustness to four European case studies of innovations in fisheries management in the Baltic Sea, the Faroe Islands, the North Sea and the Western Shelf. The innovations represent a range of systems that incorporate both rights-based management, including transferable effort allocations, and participatory governance. The overall conclusions are that the innovations of the Faroe Islands and the North Sea are socially robust with relatively high degrees of stakeholder acceptance and the ability, in many situations, to institutionally learn. In the Basque fisheries, innovations seem to be socially robust with high institutional learning, but low in stakeholders' acceptance. The Baltic innovations seem to be less socially robust compared to the other cases.