MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
To what extent are the interests of coastal communities in the underdeveloped world reflected in or protected by international law and by the multilateral treaties that govern marine use?
How have the global markets for fisheries, coastal tourism, and other coastal resources incorporated small-scale resource users and coastal communities?
How do the local historical resource politics in a given coastal community shape its integration into global patterns of marine degradation and conservation?
How and for whom are "fisheries science" and "customary" international laws of the sea constructed as universally valuable?
This conference, organized by the Political Economy of Living Marine Resource working group, examines these and other questions about the intersection of local and international practices and perceptions of marine use and conservation.
Because the ocean has long been considered an underutilized and limitless frontier, little attention has been paid until recently to the destruction of its resources and the increasingly privatized, politicized, and capitalized access to its bounty. The notion that the ocean is a limitless resource of unlimited access is quickly disintegrating in the face of stepped-up vigilance and enforcement over EEZs, migrating stocks of fish, sea floor deposits, ecological sanctuaries, fishing grounds, and shipping passages and moorings. Debates over access to marine space have begun to assume the dimensions of similar debates over access to land, which provide a useful starting point in examining the environmental politics of marine resources. By examining marine space as social space, subject to myriad conflicting rights, uses, and meanings, this conference will broadly address the environmental politics of marine resources within four principal (and often overlapping) themes:
In discussing small-scale marine and coastal industries, the concern of this conference is with subsistence fishers, small-scale fishers, local marine transport operations, and local tourism in the developing world. We are also concerned with the social and cultural diversity of coastal peoples and communities, which are based on human relationships to the sea.
The political, economic, and ecological complexity which underlies most common-property resource regimes is becoming increasingly evident in the case of the oceans. Since Hardin's grim analysis of common property use and management in 1968, there has been a growing awareness of the highly developed property rights which exist in so-called "common" property regimes; rights which are not enforced by obvious fences and sentries, but by "everyday" strategies of subtle politics and coercion.
The widespread diffusion of several marine/coastal industries has meant profound transformations for local coastal communities and small-scale fishers. For example: how do small-scale fishers and local fish markets become articulated with the globalization of corporate, large-scale, distant water fishing operations? To what extent do coastal communities accommodate or oppose the development of coastal tourism and the attendant colonization of ocean and marine space for recreational activities? How does the global system of debt and development contribute to the degradation of marine resources inasmuch as the World Bank and other international development agencies have funded improvements in fisheries and tourism infrastructure to promote nontraditional exports?
Poststructural and postmodern approaches to social and physical sciences have emphasized the ways in which power shapes dominant perceptions and meanings of people, places, and events in modern society. In the case of marine conservation, several conventional paradigms should be dismantled in order to address the complexity behind marine resource degradation. Fisheries science, for instance, is often conducted as one component of fisheries allocation negotiations between industrialized countries. Marine science, which governs the establishment of marine parks and reserves, is also questionable. Environmental conservation policies often neglect the importance of subsistence food provisioning by local or indigenous peoples. Fishing is popularly characterized as a male enterprise, disguising the vital work that women do in many marine resource industries as processors, marketers, and social reproducers. The international law of the sea was negotiated primarily between the dominant Northern fishing countries, with little regard to customary marine use in the developing world. And of course, the ocean itself is a terrain of intense conflict over meaning and use, the representations of which vary from place to place, and over time.
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