Disrupting enclosure in New England fisheries

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 63-80

  St Martin, Kevin ^a  

^a RUTGERS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMON PROPERTY RESOURCE; FISHERY ECONOMICS;

NEW ENGLAND; NORTH AMERICA; UNITED STATES; WESTERN HEMISPHERE; WORLD;

EID: 15544373650     PISSN: 10455752     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/1045575052000335375     Document Type: Article

References (68)

1. J.K. Gibson-Graham and David Ruccio, "'After' Development: Re-imagining Economy and Class," in J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff (eds.), Re/presenting Class (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 158-181.
2. On the persistence of a capitalist imaginary and its impediment to a noncapitalist future see Community Economies Collective, "Imagining and Enacting Noncapitalist Futures," Socialist Review, 28, 3 + 4, 2001, pp. 93-135.
3. Advocates of such measures dominate fisheries economic discourse. For example, see Francis T. Christy, "The Death Rattle of Open Access and the Advent of Property Rights Regimes in Fisheries," Marine Resource Eonomics, 11, 1996, pp. 287-304;
4. Ross D. Eckert, The Enclosure of Ocean Resources: Economics and the Law of the Sea (Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1979);
5. S. M. Garcia, K. Cochrane, G. Van Santen, and Francis Christy, "Towards Sustainable Fisheries: a Strategy for FAO and the World Bank," Ocean and Coastal Management, 42, 1999, pp. 369-398;
6. and Elmer A. Keen, Ownership and Productivity of Marine Fishery Resources (Blacksburg, VA: The McDonald and Woodward Publishing Company, 1988).
7. Antonio Callari, "Economics and the Postcolonial Other," in Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin and S. Charusheela (eds.), Postcolonialism Meets Economics (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 113-129.
8. While many understand and utilize the concept of class as a process rather than a category, this work relies upon a particular anti-essentialist approach. See Jack Amariglio and David F. Ruccio, "Postmodernism, Marxism, and the Critique of Modern Economic Thought," in Antonio Callari, Stephen Cullenberg, and Carole Biewener (eds.), Marxism in the Postmodern Age (New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 13-23
9. and Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, Knowledge and Class (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987).
10. For case studies see J.K. Gibson-Graham, Stephen A. Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff, (eds.), Class and Its Others (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)
11. and Marianna Pavlovskaya, "Other Transitions: Multiple Economies of Moscow Households in the 1990s," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 94, 2, 2004, pp. 329-51.
12. Also see R. Lee, A. Leyshon, and C. Williams (eds.), Alternative Economic Spaces: Rethinking the 'Economic' in Economic Geography (London: Routledge, 2003).
13. The "Buffalo Commons" (Deborah Popper and Frank Popper, "The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as Method," Geographical Review, 89, 4, 1999) provides a clear example of the power of metaphor to suggest an alternative imaginary of space. In this case, re-imagining the Great Plains as a commons has facilitated a rich and varied set of alternatives to a failing regional economy.
14. J. K. Gibson-Graham et al., op. cit., suggest that there are (and we should work to reveal) openings for a variety of economic futures/ becomings.
15. "Capitalocentric" representations of the economy and economic develoment are theories, policies, and practices that position capitalism as the essence of the economy, as a central and dominant totality relative to which all other forms of economy are peripheral and subordinate. See J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1996).
16. Kevin St. Martin, "Making Space for Community Resource Management in Fisheries," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 91, 1, 2001, pp. 122-142.
17. The interviews were part of an oral history project (S-K Grant 96-NER-166) belonging to the Gloucester Fishermen's Wives Association (GFWA). Angela Sanfilippo (director of the GFWA), Dr. Madeleine Hall-Arber (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sea-Grant Program), and Dr. Christopher Dyer (University of Rhode Island, Marine Affairs) were the principal investigators on the project. The author participated in the research design, interviews, and subsequent analysis.
18. St. Martin, op. cit.
19. This is nowhere clearer than in representations of common property fisheries that suggest related binary pairs: industrial/artisanal, modern/traditional, large scale/small scale, etc. These pairs map onto the binary of capitalist commons/pre-capitalist commons and their attendant notions of domination and subordination. While there are debates as to the boundaries between these forms, they are nevertheless the terms of representation in fisheries bioeconomics, anthropology, and policy documents. See, for example, Christopher Dahl "Traditional Marine Tenure: A Basis for Artisanal Fisheries Management," Marine Policy, 12, 1, 1988, pp. 40-48;
20. Christopher L. Dyer and James R. McGoodwin, Folk Management of the World's Fisheries (University of Colorado Press, 1994);
21. Freire and Garcia-Allut, "Socioeconomic and Biological Causes of Management Failures in European Artisanal Fisheries: The Case of Galicia (NW Spain)," Marine Policy, 24, 5, 2000, pp. 375-384,
22. and Joshua John, Managing Redundancy in Overexploited Fisheries (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1994).
23. As with most valuable resources, there have been many (international) struggles over access to the fisheries of the Northeast U.S. (i.e., the Northwest Atlantic); see, for example, Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World (New York: Walker and Company, 1997)
24. and Donald Cameron Watt, "First Steps in the Enclosure of the Oceans," Marine Policy, 3:, 1979, pp. 211-224.
25. Since 1976, however, the U.S. federal government instituted a new regime of governance that extended out to 200 miles. Foreign vessels were essentially eliminated from this Exclusive Economic Zone and a domestic fleet encouraged (M. L. Miller and J. Van Maanen, "The Emerging Organization of Fisheries in the United States," Coastal Zone Management Journal, 10, 4, 1983, pp. 369-386). It is in this context of an expanding and federally encouraged movement toward resource extraction that the resource could be said to be "open access". In the heyday that followed the banning of foreign fleets, virtually anyone could invest in a boat and begin fishing. Today, many fishers are looking for a way out.
26. Anthony Davis, "Barbed Wire and Bandwagons: A Comment on ITQ Fisheries Management," Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries, 6, 1996, pp. 97-107.
27. David Symes and Kevin Crean, "Privatization of the Commons: the Introduction of Individual Transferable Quotas in Developed Fisheries," Geoforum, 26, 2, 1995, pp. 175-185.
28. e.g. Richard Apostle, Bonnie McCay, and Knut H. Mikalsen, Enclosing the Commons: Individual Transferable Quotas in the Nova Scotia Fishery (St. John's, Newfoundland: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 2002);
29. B. McCay and S. Brandt, "Changes in Fleet Capacity and Ownership of Harvesting Rights in the United States Surf Clam and Ocean Quahog Fishery," in Ross Shotton (ed.), Case Studies on the Effects of Transferable Fishing Rights on Fleet Capacity and Concentration of Quota Ownership (Rome: FAO, 2001).
30. St. Martin, op. cit.
31. Becky Mansfield, "Neoliberalism in the Oceans: 'Rationalization,' Property Rights, and the Commons Question," Geoforum 35, 3, 2004, pp. 313-26;
32. Peter B. Doeringer, Philip I. Moss, and David G. Terkla, The New England Fishing Economy: Jobs, Income, and Kinship (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
33. Capitalist investment in fisheries has happened well before the current "opening." In the later half of the 19th century new technologies greatly increased catch, and fish stocks were still thought unexhaustible. See Tim D. Smith, Scaling Fisheries: The Science of Measuring the Efects of Fishing, 1855-1955 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Fishing in the North Atlantic was largely characterized by a capitalist class process.
34. See Wayne M. O'Leary, Maine Sea Fisheries: The Rise and Fall of a Native Industry, 1830-1890 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996)
35. and Paul Thompson, Living the Fishing (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983).
36. This capitalism, which preceeded a later pre-capitalism, could be read as an early and aborted foray into the tranformation of fisheries commons or as evidence of capitalism's partiality and fragility (cf. Gabriel Fried and Richard D. Wolff, "Modern Ancients: Self-Employed Truckers," Rethinking Marxism 7, 4, 1994, pp. 103-114). A capitalocentric story would, of course, require the former reading.
37. Davis, op. cit.;
38. Apostle, et al. op. cit.;
39. Gilsi Palsson and Agnar Helgason, "Figuring Fish and Measuring Men: The Quota System in the Icelandic Cod Fishery," in Proceedings from the Annual Science Conference of The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (St. John's Newfoundland, 1994).
40. Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976).
41. Doeringer et al., op. cit.
42. Marx, op. cit.
43. Tsjalle van der Burg, "Neo-classical economics, institutional economics and improved fisheries management," Marine Policy, 24, 1, 2000, pp. 45-51.
44. While I focus on Hardin ("The Tragedy of the Commons," Science, 162, 1968, pp. 1243-1248), this story could be told just as easily using fisheries bioeconomic references. Indeed, Hardin himself references the work of H. Scott Gordon, one of the leading theorists of fisheries bioeconomics, as having recognized the problem of the commons in fisheries previous to Hardin's 1968 article;
45. see Garrett Hardin "Ethical Implications of Carrying Capacity," in Garrett Hardin and John Baden (eds.), Managing the Commons (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1977), pp. 112-125. The Gordon /Hardin model is pervasive in fisheries;
46. see Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and Law in the California Fisheries 1850-1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
47. Indeed, it is moving from a local discourse of the North Atlantic to a global discourse explaining fisheries crisis in terms identical to that of Hardin (e.g. J. A. Gulland, "Fisheries: Looking Beyond the Golden Age," Marine Policy, 8, 2, 1984, pp. 137-150;
48. Garcia et al. op. cit.)
49. St. Martin, op. cit.
50. Callari, op. cit.
51. Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," op. cit., p. 1246.
52. Garrett Hardin, "Denial and Disguise," in Garrett Hardin and John Baden (eds.), Managing the Commons (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1977), p. 45.
53. Paul Robbins, Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
54. E.g., Elinor Ostrom, Roy Gardner, and James Walker, Rules, Games, and Common-Pool Resources (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994);
55. F. Schlager and E. Ostrom, "Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis," Land Economics, 68, 3, 1992, pp. 249-262.
56. E.g. Shankar Aswani, "Common Property Models of Sea Tenure: A Case Study from the Roviana and Vonavona Lagoons, New Georgia, Solomon Islands," Human Ecology, 27, 3, 1999, pp. 417-453;
57. Dyer and McGoodwin, op. cit.;
58. Bonnie J. McCay and James M. Acheson, The Question of the Commons (Tuscon: The University of Arizona Press, 1987);
59. B. Nietschmann, "Defending the Miskito Reefs with Maps and GPS," Cultural Survival, 18, 4, 1995, pp. 34-37.
60. c.f. Gibson-Graham and Ruccio, op. cit.
61. Kevin St. Martin, "Mapping Economic Diversity in the First World: The Case of Fisheries," Environment and Planning A, forthcoming, 2005.
62. e. g. James M. Acheson, The Lobster Gangs of Maine (Hanover, New Hampshire: University of New England Press, 1988).
63. Gibson-Graham, op. cit., p. 87, is here referring to the work of M. Moon, E. K. Sedgwick, B. Gianni, and S. Weir, "Queers in (Single Family) Space," Assemblage, 24, 1994, pp. 30-37.
64. Amariglio and Ruccio, op. cit.
65. James A. Wilson, "Fishing for Knowledge," Land Economics, 66, 1, 1990, pp. 12-29;
66. Gisli Palsson, "Enskillment at Sea," Man, 29, December 1994, pp. 875-900.
67. c.f. Stephen Gudeman and Alberto Rivera Gutiérrez, "Neither Duck Nor Rabbit: Sustainability, Political Economy, and the Dialectics of Economy," in Jacquelyn Chase (ed.), The Spaces of Neoliberalism: Land, Place and Family in Latin America, (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, Inc., 2002), pp. 159-186;
68. Blake D. Ratner and Alberto Rivera Gutierrez, "Reasserting Community: The Social Challenge of Wastewater Management in Panajachel, Guatemala," Human Organization, 63, 1, 2004, pp. 47-56.