Conference: Marine Environmental Politics in the 21st Century: MacArthur Program on Multilateral Governance, Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
Paper Abstracts:
Becky Mansfield
Department of Geography, University of Oregon
The United Nations declaration of 1998 as the Year of the Ocean reflects the increasing attention paid by policy makers, scientists, and the general public to a range of marine environmental issues, from marine pollution, to the effects of global warming on marine and coastal environments, to the problems facing coral reefs. One of the primary marine environmental issues which has received attention in recent years is the "crisis" of overfishing and economic uncertainty which is facing the world's fisheries. As awareness about this crisis has increased, there have also been debates over how to conceptualize the problems in fisheries. While over the past decade there has been an explosion in academic literature theorizing the commons and the variety of possible property arrangements for natural resource management, the "tragedy of the commons" remains the dominant model for explaining problems of overfishing and overcapacity of fishing fleets. Further, this conception has been used to support certain types of fisheries management policies which emphasize privatization of fisheries through measures such as individual transferable quotas.
Currently, the largest fishery on the west coast of the United States (excluding Alaska) is that for groundfish (bottom-dwelling fish), with Pacific whiting (Merluccius productus) as the single most important species in both dollar amount and tonnage. In the 1990s, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC), the regional governmental management body, has relied upon "tragedy of the commons" arguments to explain problems in the fishery, problems which include serious declines in several key species and overcapacity in the trawler fleet. Relying upon this model, the PFMC implemented a limited entry program, and has investigated the possibility of using individual transferable quotas. In this paper, I counter this conception of the problems in west coast fisheries. I argue instead that current problems in the groundfish fishery are the result of government development policies which had as their explicit goal the development of a large-scale fishery integrated into national and international markets for fish products. By defining problems in the groundfish fishery as being the result of the open-access nature of the fishery, the PFMC ignores the historical context of the development of this fishery. In the 1970s, the US groundfish fishery was centered on a few, nearshore species, and was relatively unimportant economically. In 1976, in an act consistent with ongoing efforts to change the international law of the sea to extend jurisdiction over the oceans, the US passed the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, creating a 200-mile zone. In this act, the federal government also defined west coast groundfish as "underutilized species" and launched fishery development initiatives to develop the west coast groundfish industry. Extensive review of federal and state legislation, congressional testimonies, PFMC documents, state and local economic and planning reports, and fishing industry newspapers and magazines indicates that over the next ten years, federal, regional, state, and local agencies were all involved in encouraging the development of the groundfish fishery. These agencies facilitated development through continued legislation, subsidies for fishing vessels and technology, and assistance in local, national, and international market development. It is through this process, not through the simple economic logic of an open-access fishery, that the west coast groundfish fishery became the large industry it is, facing the problems it does.
Using an implicit theoretical perspective, the tragedy of the commons/open access conception of problems in fisheries posits an unchanging economic process. The model further is based upon the assumption that individual profit-maximization is human nature, and therefore the problems associated with open access are inevitable. In this paper, I use a combination of theoretical perspectives to counter this argument. First, I use theories about the social construction of knowledge, drawn from cultural geography, feminist epistemology, and study of the social construction of nature, to explicitly address the assumptions about human nature and about the marine environment which inhere in the tragedy of the commons model of overfishing and use of marine resources. Second, I use geographical theoretical perspectives on regional development, the dialectic between the local and the global, and the production of space to explain the role of fishery development in shaping this regional fishery and in creating problems in the groundfish industry. This allows me to show how processes at a variety of spatial scales were all involved in the production of this fishery, and allows me to counter the tendency to look only to internal features of a system or region to explain its characteristics. Further, using these perspectives, I can show how development proponents reshaped the space of the coastal Pacific Ocean in order to integrate it into new circuits of capital and fisheries production.
The west coast groundfish fishery was created by political and economic processes at a variety of scales through which marine space was reconceptualized as a space for large scale, industrialized activity. The local region -- including the fish, the marine environment as a whole, and the local fishing communities -- have been and will continue to be impacted both by their integration into an industrialized fishing industry and by management systems which are based upon economic models which, in the end, serve to reinforce the industrialization of fishing.
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