The impact of ‘‘community’’ on fisheries management
in the US Northeast
Kevin St. Martin
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Department of Geography, 54 Joyce Kilmer Drive, Piscataway,
NJ 08854-8045, United States
Received 2 November 2004
Abstract
The discourse of fisheries science and management displaces community and culture from the essential economic dynamic of fisheries.
The goal of this dominant discourse is to enclose fisheries, to constitute them as within the singular and hegemonic economy of
capitalism. Alternative economies, such as those based on the presence of community, are always seen as either existing before or
beyond the dominant economic formation. The category of community is, nevertheless, being incorporated into contemporary fisheries
science and management where it has the potential to disrupt the ontological foundations of the current management regime.
To avoid disruption, community is situated such that it is the domain of anthropology while the essential economic dynamic of fisheries
remains the purview of fisheries bioeconomics. Community can be identified, documented, and analyzed but always only as a
site of economic impact and never as a constituent of the economic itself. Curiously, this disciplining of community has a literal
geographic dimension: the discursive domain of bioeconomics corresponds to the spatial domain of fisheries resources themselves
while that of fisheries social science/anthropology corresponds to the terrestrial locations where fishers reside. Fishing ports become
the place of community while the actual common property resource remains the site where the essential economic dynamic reigns
uncompromised.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Economic discourse; Community; Political ecology; Commons; Fisheries; Space
‘‘Economics does not so much abolish the other
(for it needs it as a reference point with which to
assert its own self), as it controls its location in
the social space.’’ (Callari, 2004, p. 118)
1. Introduction
It has become commonplace to assert that the sustainable
use of common property resources is possible (both
historically and presently) via the existence and health of
local communities and community-based economic practices.
Indeed, processes of community are given credit for
averting common property overuse and degradation
across a wide variety of societies and places (e.g. Berkes,
1989; McCay and Acheson, 1987). While there are many
empirical examples that point to the importance of community
and other social processes (e.g. culture and kinship)
as factors that constrain individual appropriation
of resources and serve to mitigate an otherwise inevitable
‘‘tragedy of the commons’’ (Hardin, 1968), they most frequently
originate from traditional, pre-industrial, and
pre-capitalist locations. In these sites community is seen
as strong and central to both social organization and
local economies. Elsewhere, community and community-based
economies are seen as eroded and displaced
by modern, individualist, and capitalist forms of society/economy.
In the discourse of common property
0016-7185/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2005.05.004
E-mail address: kstmarti@rci.rutgers.edu
www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
resources, as community and community-based restrictions
on resource use are weakened and eroded the
necessity for privatization and the logic of individual
property rights, resource appropriation, and accumulation
strengthens and grows.
In terms of policy and politics, the presence of community
suggests the possibility of community-based solutions
to the overexploitation of common property
resources. Its strength and centrality make it, in many
cases, the ontological starting point for imagining effective
and sustainable commons resource management. In
addition, community managed natural resources suggest
local economies that are a function of community rather
than strictly the needs of capital (Gudeman and RiveraGutie´rrez,
2002). Common property resources are here
clearly intertwined with local and community-based economic
processes. In contrast, the erosion and absence of
community suggests only neoclassical and individual
rights based solutions to commons degradation; the commons
must be privatized and subordinated to the rational
logic of capitalism. This binary representation of commons
futures is nowhere more evident than in our stories
of marine fisheries. There the binary of fishing community/individual
‘‘fisherman’’1
is associated with a host
of other binary pairs (e.g. artisanal/industrial, pre-capitalist/capitalist,
local knowledge/scientific knowledge,
cooperative/competitive, third world/first world) such
that those locations associated with community are open
to a variety of (particularly community-based) economic
futures while those associated with individual competitive
behavior necessitate neoliberal privatizations and a
singular capitalist future (St. Martin, 2005).
Despite a binary logic that relegates communitybased
economies to distant third world locations,
community is increasingly visible and relevant to industrialized,
first world locations. This paper seeks to explore
the emergence of community at several levels. At
a theoretical level, community is emerging from feminist
and anti-essentialist readings of the economy. There, the
image of a homogenously capitalist first world populated
by utility maximizing individuals or corporations
is being challenged by work that reveals the economy
as a multiplicity of capitalist and non-capitalist relations,
identities, and spaces (Gibson-Graham, 1996;
Gibson-Graham et al., 2000; Pavlovskaya, 2004). The
re-reading of economy as diverse suggests a focus on
how economic subjectivities are constituted thus opening
the space of the economy to a multiplicity of processes
such as those of culture and community (cf.
Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela, 2004). From this perspective,
where economy is not structured around the
singular and exclusively economic dynamic of capitalism,
a case study that examines the insertion of ‘‘community’’
might ask: does the emergence of community
herald an opening/disruption in dominant forms of economic
discourse such that community and cultural processes
might be seen as fundamentally part of economies
and the natural resource regimes they constitute?
The theoretical opening of economic space to culture
and community in the first world (e.g. Community
Economies Collective, 2001) is a project that can clearly
benefit from the experiences and insights of a political
ecology that has long documented the existence of
‘‘community economies’’ in the third world (e.g. Gudeman
and Rivera-Gutie´rrez, 2002) and are now looking
increasingly to the first world (Walker, 2003; Robbins,
2002). There they are revealing and reifying the importance
of community processes relative to common property
regimes and resource management where none had
been previously imagined (e.g. McCarthy, 2002; Mackenzie
and Dalby, 2003; Walker and Fortmann, 2003).
Community, in these cases, counters dominant representations
(e.g. those found in neoclassical resource
economics) and assumptions about common property
utilization as a site of only rationalist individual behavior.
It would seem that categories, processes, and identities
once documented only in the pre-industrial and
pre-capitalist periphery are increasingly evident within
the center of capitalism.
At the level of implementation and institutionalization
community is also emerging; it is being ontologically defined
and utilized within first world resource management
regimes themselves (Kellert et al., 2000). It is now a vital
category that is constituted through direct community
participation in resource management via communitybased
fora for policy development, community assessment
and review of policies, and even community-based
science and a celebration of its associated local knowledge
systems. This insertion of community, as an ontological
category within institutions of science and
management, suggests that we must examine the specifics
of the use of community in particular resource management
regimes. How is it being inserted into the practices
of resource management (e.g. data collection, analysis,
reporting, etc.) and what are the effects of such an insertion
in terms of policy development? Does the transferal
and translation of categories typically associated with
third world natural resource policy development (e.g.
community) indicate an erosion of the first world/third
world divide? Does the emerging presence of community
disrupt the binary of first world/third world? And does
community suggest a new potential for alternative and
1
Here, and throughout the paper, I use the term ‘‘fisherman/men’’ to
signify the imagined individual, independent, and competitive fisher of
fisheries science and management discourse. The term fisher, also used
throughout this paper, refers to all people who work as harvesters of
fish within commercial enterprises regardless of their position and
assumes nothing about their relationships with each other (e.g.
cooperative or competitive). A fisher may be any one of several crew
members (e.g. captain, mate, engineer, deckhand) and may or may not
own a fishing boat.
170 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
community-based forms of common property resource
management even in the heart of capitalism?
The case of fisheries in the first world provides insight
into the way community as a category is moving from
the third world to the first world. In terms of inquiry,
fisheries social science, once restricted to neoclassical
economic analyses based on individual behavior (Clay
and McGoodwin, 1995; Dyer, 1994), is growing to include
work that reveals and focuses on the presence of
community in even the most industrial of first world
fisheries (e.g. Apostle et al., 1998; Jentoft, 1999, 2000;
Leal, 1996; McCay and Jentoft, 1996; Olson, 2005; St.
Martin, 2001). This work ranges from analyses of the
impact of management initiatives on communities
(McCay et al., 2002a,b) to the potential for communities
themselves to manage commons resources (Acheson,
1989; Kearney, 1989; Wilson et al., 1994). In all cases,
community and community processes are made visible
and relevant where there was once only individual fishermen.
In addition to social science inquiry, community
is emerging within the institutions of fisheries management
in the first world. Within the United States, the
federal government now mandates its consideration relative
to fisheriesÕ management such that defining it,
making it visible, and assessing it are now unavoidable
within the fisheries management regime. Therefore,
there is a growing record of the ways that the category
of community is being translated and utilized in this first
world resource policy context.
Federal fisheries management in the US Northeast
(the site of this case) is, of course, focused on fish resources
rather than fishing communities or even industry
per se. Management is management of the common fish
resources that lie within the US Exclusive Economic
Zone of the Northwest Atlantic. The insertion of community
within such a natural resource management regime
raises questions precisely about the relationship between
community and the utilization of fisheries resources.
How are they thought of relative to each other within
the dominant discourse of fisheries science and management?
What potential is there for community relative to
the management of the resource? Similarly, what potential
is there for the resource to be viewed and managed
as a commons governed by and/or with community par-
ticipation?2
In addition, if as Gudeman and Rivera-Gutie´rrez
(2002) assert ‘‘[a] community economy, above
all, makes and shares a commons’’, then it is imperative
to understand the relationship between community and
commons as well as the constitution of community and
commons themselves if one is to reveal in any detail the
presence or potential of a fishing community economy
in the US Northeast. Indeed, a commons is arguably
the necessary space within which alternative economic
(e.g. community) subjects must find themselves.
Will the presence of community in first world fisheries
imply a similar intertwining of community and cultural
processes with the economic as it does elsewhere? Will it
disrupt the hegemonic vision of a capitalist economy
and its attendant neoliberal policies of privatization that
are so dependent upon an ontology of individuals
unconstrained by community? Does the presence of
community enlarge our currently limited imaginary
relative to fisheries management to include communitybased
management and community economies generally?
To do so it is imperative that we continue to reveal
the presence of community, of the other within the
domain of the dominant (St. Martin, 2005), and trace
its effects. We must, however, also show the ways that
presence can be interpreted, categorized, and disciplined
such that dominant systems of natural resource management
and economy remain intact.
This article is, therefore, an interrogation into the
emergence and subsequent disciplining of community
in fisheries resource management. The paper begins
with an examination of the discourse of fisheries science
and management and the position of community
within it. It relies upon a postcolonial interpretation
of fisheries bioeconomic discourse. In particular, how
this discourse has successfully distanced and made
subordinate the category of community and related
processes relative to an essential economic dynamic
of fisheries. It then briefly outlines the mechanisms of
insertion of community into science and management
with a focus on the spatial aspects thereof. A review
of recent initiatives to address community produces a
distinct image of community as a site of regulatory impact
that is separate from the resources upon which it
depends. Community, while important to understanding
the effects of fisheries policy, is not seen as resident
or effective within either the literal or discursive economic
domain of fisheries/fisheries bioeconomics. The
implications of such a vision of community and
resources are discussed and an alternative vision is
suggested, one that emerges from a re-thinking of
economy as never enclosed or explained by a single
and exclusive economic dynamic but potentially open
and interpretable in terms a diversity of processes such
as culture and community.
2. The discourse of bioeconomics and the struggle
for enclosure
There is a dominant bioeconomic discourse of fisheries
science and management that has been instituted in
2
In this paper the word ‘‘commons’’ will be understood to mean a
commonly held resource associated with and, indeed, constituted by a
community. While common property is often perceived as devoid of
community (e.g. open access fisheries), this paper theorizes the ways
common property (especially open access fisheries) might be rethought
in terms of community, i.e. how they might be or become a commons.
K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184 171
research, branches of government, and regional fisheries
management councils in the US during the last quarter
of the 20th century (on its origins and history see Cushing,
1988; Smith, 1994). The goal of this discourse is to
produce a neoclassical understanding of fisheries that
would be instrumental in the technocratic management
of fisheries resources (Cushing, 1977; Smith, 1998). Fisheries
bioeconomics, despite common perceptions of fishing
as exceptional economically and/or culturally,
implements the same essential economic subject and
conception of space found within neoclassical economics
and its representations of the hegemonic capitalist
economy. The discipline of bioeconomics attempts to
enclose fisheries within the discursive space of the economy
proper, to capture it within standard neoclassical
assumptions of subjectivity and space. In so doing, fisheries
are reduced to a function of utility, to the behavior
of individual fishermen, and community, culture, and
other related processes are banished from the space of
the economy. This section explores this process of discursive
enclosure and resulting alterity; it examines the
process by which fisheries are constituted in terms of a
narrow definition of economy and other possibilities
are silenced or made distant.
2.1. Enclosing economic space3
The discursive enclosure of fisheries is intertwined
with a desire to literally enclose fisheries as transferable
property rather than the technically open access resource
that it is now (Charles, 1988; Eckert, 1979; Keen,
1988; Scott, 1988; van der Burg, 2000). Indeed, the
uniqueness of bioeconomics relative to standard neoclassical
resource economics revolves around the absence
of property rights in fisheries. This absence
suggests a need to discipline fisheries and to produce a
modern-day enclosure of the commons (Apostle et al.,
2002). Without such property rights and relations modern
industrialized fisheries remain not-fully-developed
and, without some intervention or exogenous management,
will inevitably suffer a ‘‘tragedy of the commons’’
(Hardin, 1968). HardinÕs article, although concerned
with population growth, was partly inspired by the work
of fisheries economists during the two previous decades
(McEvoy, 1986). In particular, the work of H. Scott
Gordon, cited by many as the founder of fisheries economics
(Smith, 1994), foreshadows Hardin. While there
are extensive disputations, commentaries, and discussion
of the Gordon–Hardin model, I am here interested
in how this model at once inscribes fisheries as deviant
yet captures fisheries and sees it as within the same economic
space and within the same disciplinary understanding
of economy found in descriptions of the
hegemonic/capitalist non-fishing economy.
While the Gordon–Hardin model points to the flaw
inherent in common property, it can do so only by
speaking of fisheries (or other common property regimes)
as already within the space of a marketized and
capitalist economy. The model suggests an ontological
frame by which to know and understand fisheries; a
frame built upon a particular economic subject and a
particular notion of an economic space, familiar neoclassical
representations of the economy generally (also
see Kirby, 1996 on the mutual constitution of subject
and space). The subject in fisheries bioeconomics is the
fisherman who is equivalent to the utility seeking economic
man of neoclassical economics. In addition, the
corresponding space of fishing is a container of objectified
and available-for-appropriation resources; this is
the Cartesian space that serves as the template for capitalism
(cf. Boelhower, 1988). Subject and space combine
such that fishermen are individual, mobile, and
competitive utility maximizers who work within and
throughout an abstract statistical space containing
quantities of fish (St. Martin, 2001). Where in this space
they might go, with whom, and from which port are
irrelevant considerations relative to the enumeration
and aggregation of fish and fishing effort across space.
The economic space constructed and governed by a single
economic calculus is dependent upon the reification
of these particular ontological elements.
That such an economic understanding of fisheries
would emerge is not surprising given the economic-like
language and the centrality of equilibrium modeling in
early fisheries biology. What is interesting, however, is
the degree to which this particular economic discourse
with its attendant ontology of fishermen and resources
becomes foundational for understanding fisheries across
a variety of institutions. Academic, governmental, and
international organizations have all adopted this vision
of fisheries and have designed data collection initiatives,
performed scientific analyses, and developed management
strategies based upon it. The basic elements of this
singular fishing economy have been identified and are
made knowable though a variety of practices and performances;
the fishing economy, stripped bare of other
processes, becomes obvious, natural, and uncontestable.
Other processes such as those of culture, society, or
community are decidedly outside of this narrowly drawn
economy of fisheries.
An important aspect of this economic vision of fishing
is the necessarily developmentalist nature of fisheries
interventions. The loss of economic rent due to a deficiency
in property relations is a deficiency relative to
modern forms of private property and capitalist relations
3
The term ‘‘economic space’’ refers to the discursive domain that is
claimed by economics. This space is bounded such that beyond the
boundary is the location of any economic others. Where space is
discussed without the modifier ‘‘economic’’ the reader should assume a
geographic space (e.g. the space of fishing). The sometimes blurred
distinction between these spaces is seen here as unavoidable.
172 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
generally. Fisheries, by virtue of their common property
nature (whether open access or otherwise) are seen as
pre-capitalist or not-yet-fully capitalist economies that
are necessarily less efficient and productive than fully
capitalist economies. The former can only aspire to the
latter through the advent of private property relations
or management schemes that simulate such relations
(cf. The Ecologist, 1999; Escobar, 1995; Shiva, 1990;
Yapa, 1991). Given the ontological assumptions outlined
above, the singular economy of fisheries is predestined
to mirror an equally singular capitalist economy
that, once implemented vis-a`-vis private property institutions,
will solve the problems of fishing both in terms
of dissipated rent and environmental degradation. The
dominant discourse of fisheries, then, inscribes a particular
economy and economic future as the fundamental
understanding and way of knowing fisheries.
The discourse of bioeconomics produces a bounded
economic space, it encloses a particular notion of subjectivity
and space such that the retention of an open access
regime of property will inevitably result in tragedy. The
subject and space produced also suggest a single route to
a non-tragic future that involves the literal enclosure
and privatization of fisheries resources. As with past
enclosures of common property, the discursive enclosure
clears communities and their associated social/cultural
relations from the domain of economy and produces a
resource open to discursive and literal appropriation.4
2.2. The silencing of community5
While the subject and space of the dominant discourse
clearly have utility as well as limitations, I am
here concerned with the silences produced by this discourse
(cf. Harley, 1988). The reduction of fishers to
competing individual fishermen and of space to a container
of aggregate resources makes statements about
the economic agency of community or the embeddedness
of economy in unique places difficult if not impossible
to insert into fisheries science and management.
While there are many silences within any discourse,
the absence of community in this economic discourse
of fisheries is, perhaps, not surprising if community is
the other to the economic subject of the dominant discourse.
It is community that has long represented an
alternative yet subordinate approach to the privatization
of fisheries. Celebrated by anthropologists and others
working beyond the boundaries of the dominant
discourse, community and culture complicate and divert
the inevitable rent dissipation and environmental degradation
of common property regimes (see examples in
McCay and Acheson, 1987). Relying upon case studies
that are primarily from the third world, these researchers
point to the resourcefulness of communities to manage
common property such that a tragedy is avoided
without the imposition of private property or capitalist
relations of production. As examples that might inform
first world policy development, however, these studies
are stifled by the ontological absence of community
from the dominant discourse, the solutions to the problem
of fishing that they represent are seen only as distant
curiosities. How is it that community and place are
made distant and invisible in this sector of the economy
that is so closely associated with popular notions of
‘‘fishing communities’’ and intimate knowledge of environment
and place? In terms of the subject of fishing,
how is the silence relative to community produced?
Curiously, reading bioeconomics one does not easily
find individual ‘‘fishermen’’ despite their centrality in
the discourse. Rather one finds an aggregated ‘‘fishing
effort’’ which is the outcome of the utility maximizing
behavior of individual abstract economic (fisher)men
(e.g. Anderson, 1986; Clark, 1985). Fishing effort is an
essential variable in the economy of fisheries; it is the
variable most responsible for mortality rates of fish
and the variable that must be technocratically controlled
such that fish populations can recover (from a state of
overfishing) or be sustained (given the propensity for
fishermen to always increase effort on an open access
commons). The essential economy of fisheries revolves
around fishing effort and the solution to fisheries problems
revolves around its control.
Fishing effort, as the product of aggregated individual
behavior, is, quite literally, distributed across the space
of the economy, the demarcated spaces of various
science and management regimes (e.g. any number of
spaces that correspond to statistical areas for scientific
assessment and, often, technical management). The distributed
nature of fishermen (cf. Amariglio and Ruccio,
2001), as fishing effort, works to erase individual and unique
fishers in all their fullness and complexity; fishermen,
individual yet originating nowhere, are thus
unconstrained by culture or community. In addition,
the even distribution of effort across space erases the unique
places within which and through which fishers
might work and live; the space of fishing, understood
to be everywhere subject to fishing effort (or other essential
quantities), is devoid of any trace of community or
community territory. Institutionalized practices of data
collection and analyses in these terms act to reify the
essential ontology of fishing and produce a silence relative
to community. What can be said about community
if all fishing effort originates from nowhere and is distributed
across the entire scientific/management space?
4
For an analogous story of enclosure and appropriation via
cartographic and literary representations, see Boelhower (1988),
Harley (1992), and Michie and Thomas (2003).
5
This section is largely informed by the authorÕs experience as a
National Research Council Associate located at the DOC/NOAA/
NMFS Northeast Fisheries Science Center, Woods Hole, MA 2000–
2001.
K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184 173
In addition, there is a similar silencing of community
even when it is viewed as a set of social relations rather
than a location of origin (e.g. port) or territorial domain
at sea. The social relations of production within which
fishers are embedded are difficult to reconstruct given
standard forms of data collection. For example, most
federal fisheries data collection initiatives are designed
to support the assessment and management of the resource
as such (hence the focus on fishing effort and fish
population dynamics generally). Data (e.g. landings
data which give insight into fishing mortality) is collected
not by individual fisher but by fishing vessel
(Pierce and Hugl, 1979). While this again points to the
absence of ‘‘fishermen’’ per se within the discourse, it
is clear that to represent fishermen as aggregated and
distributed fishing effort one must have a basic unit for
data reporting and collection. Fishing vessels are that
unit, and since the discourse assumes a universe of individual
fishermen, the vessels come to represent those
individual fishermen themselves. This merging of fisherman
and vessel makes the multiple positions associated
with fishing vessels (for example boat owner, partner,
union, captain, or crew member and differentiations
within each category) and the social relations that result
impossible to see. Indeed, within the dominant discourse
there is little mention of crew and virtually no data collected
concerning crew, forms or rates of compensation,
or boat-level social/economic conditions generally. Any
(potential) community of fishers on board a fishing
vessel is erased by the easy conflation of vessels with
abstract individual fishermen. The following is from
a standard bioeconomics text and clearly dismisses
non-owner crew members as other than fishermen:
For the purposes of the present discussion [models
of fishermenÕs behavior], the word fisherman will
be used to refer to the independent owner–operator
of a fishing vessel. (Clark, 1985, p. 146)
Data collection practices that are boat-centric serve to
produce the rational and singular fisherman independent
of any physical community or set of social relations
relative to other fishermen (e.g. those other fishers on
board the same vessel, fishers who work for a non-fishing
boat owner, fishers linked through union membership,
etc.). Data collected by vessel, primarily designed
for the calculation of aggregate fishing effort, reifies
the essential subject of fishing as a fisherman who is mobile,
independent, and individual; community as a category
within the discourse and a site of economic
activity/agency does not exist nor do alternative fisher
subject positions.
Similarly, in terms of the literal space of fishing, there
is a silence relative to community. The space of fisheries
is mapped by the dominant discourse as the statistical
space for the collection and aggregation of data on
quantities of fish and/or the calculation of fishing effort.
Fig. 1 is a typical rendering of fisheries in the New England
and Mid-Atlantic management regions, itself a vast
area. This is one of several similar maps produced by
government sponsored fisheries science meant to inform
fisheries management in this part of the US.6
The map
depicts fishing effort by 10-minute square. While it does
not distribute fishing effort evenly across the entire space
(only within each square), the spatialization evident is
used for visualization only and does not inform the
all-important prediction of fish population as a function
of effort (indeed, assumptions about the mobility of fish
and singularity of fish stocks by species make this level
of spatialization largely irrelevant). That is, the map
may show effort by location but effort is, within the
essential economic dynamic, understood as evenly distributed.
For our purposes, the map clearly illustrates
a silence relative to community; fishing effort is
abstracted from any ports or any domains and is an
aggregated quantity distributed across the space of
management (albeit by 10-minute square).
These and similar standard maps of fishing effort are
silent concerning the location of fishing communities.
The formal discourse of fisheries science and management,
while not reviewed here in detail, suggests an epistemic
silence (cf. Harley, 1988) relative to communities
that is evident in both representations of the subject and
space of fishing. Postcolonial readings of economy (e.g.
Zein-Elabdin and Charusheela, 2004), however, suggest
that which is silenced within the dominant economic discourse
must be relegated to somewhere; community,
insofar as it acts as the other to the individual economic
actor, must be understood as existing in some place
external to the economy from which it has been purged.
2.3. Community and commons as the constitutive
outside of bioeconomics
In fisheries bioeconomics discourse the production of
alterity, however muted, is evident in a property historicism
reminiscent of classical economic theory (Callari,
2004). The fisheries commons, in bioeconomic discourse
(particularly in its initial formulation in the mid-20th
century, e.g. Gordon, 1954), is assumed to be either devoid
of property relations (i.e. ‘‘open access’’) or contain
weak rights that do not sufficiently restrict access to resources.
Modern (individual) property rights are not yet
developed or instituted, and, as a result, environmental
degradation and dissipation of resource rent are inevitable.
The maturation of property rights that occurs along
6
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is the main
supplier of fisheries data and scientific analysis to regional fisheries
management councils that develop and implement fisheries management
plans (FMPs). NMFS data typically lacks geographic precision
which is not necessary given the dataÕs use in region-wide bioeconomic
modeling.
174 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
with modern capitalist development spreading outward
across space (from first world to third world) ensures
the efficient and rational use of resources and the greatest
return from inputs. Un- or underdeveloped economies
are a function of historically prior forms of
property and the influence of community. For example,
Callari (2004) suggests that classical economists explained
the lack of economic development in India by
‘‘. . .the arrested development of forms of property. . .
and the persistence of the communal ÔvillageÕ as a basic
unit of social organization, a situation which only British
colonial rule could change’’ (p. 120).
The other of capitalist development, private property,
and the individual economic subject was, for both classical
economists and early bioeconomists, located before
or beyond contemporary and proximate economic
space. As a distant other (in either time or space),
community-centered societies, common property, and
pre-capitalism serve to constitute the here and now (contemporary
first world locations) as sites of individual
utility, resources for appropriation, and capitalism (St.
Martin, 2005). This ‘‘constitutive outside’’ continues to
be produced by contemporary fisheries social scientists
who construct, through their research in distant locations,
an image of fishing communities and territories
where the assumptions of the dominant bioeconomic
discourse do not hold. In these examples, community
and culture are fundamental to understanding the economy
of natural resource use and the fishing economy is
made up of more than just the motivations and desires
of individual economic men. In addition, these same
examples point to the commons as other than a
container of resources for appropriation; rather, it is a
heterogeneous and intimately experienced site of community.
That is, where community and culture intervene
to avert a ‘‘tragedy of the commons,’’ the commons is
associated with and constituted by community. Within
these alternative economic spaces that are fundamentally
different from that delimited by the dominant
discourse, community and commons are inseparable
Fig. 1. Map showing fishing effort for both the New England and Mid-Atlantic management regions. Produced for a document relevant to the
groundfish FMP, this map is illustrative of the spatial ontology utilized by the National Marine Fisheries Service and the regional management
councils. This image shows locations of trawl fishing activity for the years 1995–2001. Where boats went when absent from shore is indicated but
from which community the boats originated is not shown.
K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184 175
(cf. Gudeman and Rivera-Gutie´rrez, 2002; Ratner and
Rivera-Gutie´rrez, 2004). What is, in this case, outside
the domain of fisheries bioeconomics is a necessary
intertwining of community and commons that is contrary
to the necessary severing (and, in literal terms,
clearing) of community from commons that results from
an insistence upon the neoclassical economic subject and
space.
The property historicism that distances (either temporally
or geographically) any alternative models of natural
resource economies suggests, at least in the case of
fishing, a set of characteristics that we might call the
community management model. Within this model individuals
are ontologically understood as community
members governed by community and cultural processes
that are part and parcel of their economic decision-making.
In addition, the commons is a commonly held and
managed space of social relations as well as natural resources
and is inseparable from community itself. That
such an alternative, however, remains only applicable/
imaginable outside the domain of the dominant discourse
is not surprising; indeed, the before and beyond
nature of this alternative serves to reinforce/constitute
the hegemony of bioeconomic discourse and its fundamental
assumptions of subject and space in the center.
3. The advent of community and contradiction
Third world natural resource regimes where community
and commons are ontologically given, have taught
many anthropologists and political ecologists that models
other than that of a privatized and rationalized natural
resource regime are possible.7
This knowledge, with
clear origins in the third world, is coming home. In the
case of fisheries, the advent of community as a category
by which to understand contemporary first world fisheries
and to inform management is seen as an implementation
of that knowledge born of the third world and
carried to new research sites, management positions,
and consultancy projects. That is, the appearance of
processes and actors other than those of neoclassical
economics suggests an opening for alternative theorizations
in the tradition of anthropology and political ecology
as well as a set of contradictions for the dominant
discourse (Olson, 2005). The question remains whether
the advent of community will transform the dominant
discourse or if the latter will domesticate and assimilate
the former. What follows is a brief exploration of the
ways that community is being operationalized in the first
world fisheries of the US Northeast.
3.1. Legislating the presence of community
Recent federal legislation, responding to a variety of
pressures, has introduced the category of community as
an explicit object to be considered by fisheries management
councils when deliberating fisheries management
plans (FMPs). The federal government, with the passage
of the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 (SFA, Public
Law 104-297), itself an amendment to the Magnuson
Act of 1976,8
has written into law this previously ignored
category; what had only been seen in vestigial
or peripheral fishing villages in the US is now emerging
as virtually ubiquitous. The SFA mandates impact
assessments of management plans on ‘‘fishing communities.’’
Perhaps because the act presented only the most
general notion of a fishing community,
The term ‘‘fishing community’’ means a community
which is substantially dependent on or substantially
engaged in the harvest or processing of
fishery resources to meet social and economic
needs, and includes fishing vessel owners, operators,
and crew and United States fish processors
that are based in such community. (SFA, Public
Law 104-297)
there has been a flurry of activity designed to both define
and incorporate into analyses and management fishing
communities.9
While the actÕs definition of community
does not consign community to a terrestrial location,
it is being interpreted only in this way.
The federal legislation cited above emerged from the
strength of Alaska based politicians whose home state
has a preponderance of settlements that might easily be
defined as fishing communities by a number of standards
(e.g. population employed in fisheries, income generated
by fisheries, single industry towns, or cultural/historical
ties to fisheries). Such standards are difficult to use in
the Northeast and, indeed, in many regions of the United
States where fisheries are but one of several coastal
industries often embedded amongst and within urban
or even suburban locations. While the term community
7
That is not to say that such alternative regimes are not also fraught
with problems related to environmental degradation or allocation of
resources. Despite such similarities, they remain alternative models of
economy based on alternative ontological categories such as community
suggesting alternative foundations for future economies.
8
It was the Magnuson Stevens Fisheries Conservation Act of 1976
that heralded a new era of fisheries management in the United States.
This act set up regional fisheries management councils to produce
fisheries management plans that would govern how individual species
of fish could be harvested within the US exclusive economic zone (the
‘‘200 mile limit’’). Council rulings, however, need approval by the
Department of Commerce and increasingly subject to federal scientific
oversight.
9
For example, the National Marine Fisheries Service sponsored a
workshop on ‘‘communities in fisheries.’’ This workshop, of which the
author was a participant, focused on the definition and analysis of
communities in fisheries.
176 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
did not in this case emerge from the third world per se, it
has clearly traveled from the periphery to the urban and
industrial centers of the Northeast. The implementation
of community is in a very direct sense a transferal of a
category and understanding of fisheries that is filled with
meaning in the peripheral communities of rural Alaska
to a location that has until recently been populated, in
terms of the discourse of science and management, only
by individual fishermen.
3.2. Community disruptions
The insertion of community presents to the dominant
regime of fisheries science and management a number of
potential contradictions. In particular, the dominant
discourse is forced to address and incorporate the very
term that had been so early on made irrelevant by virtue
of its distance, by its relegation to the pre-industrial and
pre-development world. Despite it being an essentially
third world category, in terms of economic understandings
of resources and their exploitation, community
must now be located and placed within the first world.
Indeed, communities must be found, using some standard
methods, and analyzed relative to fisheries in the
industrial Northeast of the US.
To accept communities everywhere, to see them as
co-extensive with the urban and mixed industrial environments
of the Northeast (as opposed to only in isolated
rural villages), threatens the dominant discourse
in a number of important ways. First, the forced recognition
of community contradicts the scientific and managerial
vision of fisheries where individual fishermen are
subject of this discourse. The introduction of communities
suggests a different economic actor with motivations
and affinities impossible in the dominant model. The
dominant discourse of individual competition on an
open access commons produces methods of management
that favor the limitation of access to the resource
(e.g. there are presently limitations on the number days
at sea per year and license quotas in many fisheries of
the Northeast) as applied to individual fishing boats
(themselves conflated with individual fishermen as discussed
above). Under this regime, individual boats are
assessed, penalized, or favored. Incorporating communities
into such a system, which until now has largely
been blind to the influences of community and culture
on fishing practices (seeing neither communities on
boats nor the communities in which boats are embedded)
would disrupt the fundamental assumptions of
the dominant discourse.
Second, the assessment of communities requires the
locating and bounding of existing communities. They
must be placed somewhere and labeled before they can
be assessed or otherwise incorporated into science and
management. Fishermen, as abstract fishing effort distributed
across the management region, required no
such placing. In its aggregate form, fishing effort could
be measured and, as is most often the case, limited via
legislation that does not differentiate fishing vessels
based on, for example, community membership. Again,
there is the potential for community to disrupt the basic
foundations of fisheries science and management.
Here the foundational nowhereness of fishermen is
countered and contradicted by the absolute locations
of communities.
Third, communities as ontological objects of analysis
suggest the need for an alternative notion of resource
use. Fishing effort can be measured relative to individual
species of fishing within a discourse of equilibrium and
disequilibrium and fishing effort can then be duly reduced
or eliminated as necessary by restricting the practices
of individual boats. Fishing communities, however,
are difficult to imagine, measure, and manage relative to
individual species. Communities, in most definitions,
suggest a variety of fishing vessels, gear types, and a
dependence upon a mix of marine species and fishing
practices over time. Their relationship, as a single entity,
to the resource is difficult to gauge or imagine given a
tradition of single species management in fisheries.
Finally, the contradiction of community is also felt at
the epistemological level. Communities are, in many
cases, becoming participants in the production of fisheries
knowledge (Wilson, 1998; Neis et al., 1999; Maurstad,
2000). Both historical and contemporary studies
are revealing fishers as knowing subjects whose knowledge
of the environment is being elevated to a status that
removes it from the domain of anecdote to that of science
(Ames, 1997, 2004; Graham et al., 2002). This
move, in part a function of the insertion of community
(here communities of knowledge producers, see Palsson,
1994) also challenges the authority and hegemony of the
dominant discourse.
The process of alterity suggested earlier, a property
historicism that produces both a homogenous modern
economy and its (temporally or geographically) distant
other, is being fundamentally challenged by the recent
turn in (first world/industrial) fisheries science and management
toward a consideration of community in terms
of both collaborative research with groups of fishers and
assessments of economic and social impacts of management
upon fishing communities. Responding to this demand
clearly requires an ontological admission of the
presence of fishing communities and their relevance to
fishers and fishing practices; it suggests the presence of
the other (in this case represented by community) within
the economic domain of first world fisheries. Denying
this presence, relegating it to distant lands or historic
moments is, it would seem, no longer tenable. If the
dominant discourse must resolve the contradictions of
community or itself be transformed, how might community
be ontologically defined, analyzed, and understood
while preserving the identity of fishing as the practice of
K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184 177
atomized individuals competing on an open access commons?
How can one preserve the economic domain and
its essential elements while simultaneously responding to
the advent and insertion of the category community?
4. (Dis)placing community
In addition to property historicism Callari (2004)
points to another discursive mechanism that emerged
with neo-classical economics by which alterity is produced;
a mechanism that is also resident in fisheries
economic thought. Based on a cultural turn within economics,
alterity is located not in specific (other) geographical
locations but within the domain of culture as
now distinct and severed from the domain of the
economic.
‘‘Whereas in the case of property historicism, the
other had been placed outside the homogeneous
space of the modern economy, it had nonetheless
remained as a visible element in the narrative of
history as an evolution of economic systems. For
the new economics, however, the turn to the cultural
framing of the other places it entirely on
the outside of the borders of the economic space.
References to the other, in so far as they enter
the discourse. . . must, in this case, be filtered
through the prism of the stylized (private/public)
relationship between the economic and the noneconomic
which . . .works to absorb the other
and deny to it any possibility of subjectivity as
other.’’ (Callari, 2004, p. 127)
Here, for example, communities, even fishing communities,
might be found within the geographical space of the
hegemonic economy but are inevitably ascribed to culture
and thus removed from the discursive space of the
economic. As an essentially non-economic process, community/culture
is the purview of anthropology or related
disciplines while the essential economic story represented
by the behavior of economic men remains the
undisputed domain of economics or, in the case of fisheries,
the harvesting practices of fishermen (as measures
of effort) relative to quantities of fish remains the undisputed
domain of bioeconomics. The new boundary that
maintains the identity of the dominant economic discourse
is no longer between stages in modes of production/property
but between the economic and the
cultural; from a property historicism perspective, culture
may have been integral to other forms of economy in the
past or in distant locations but now it can be severed entirely
from the economic and constituted by other discourses
such as anthropology (cf. Zein-Elabdin and
Charusheela, 2004).
Just how community is being incorporated into fisheries
science and management is evident in the following
examples from the Northeast where the author has been
an active participant in attempts to define and operationalize
the category of community. At several levels
community is finding its way into the discourse of fisheries
in both the New England and Mid-Atlantic management
regions. The regional councils, due to the
federal mandate, must now officially address economic
and social impacts upon communities for each of the
fishery management plans (FMPs) it develops. Each
plan (or plan amendment) must contain an assessment
and resultant documentation of both economic (EIAs)
and social impacts (SIAs) upon communities.10
The federal
government has also responded to the emerging
need for community expertise by hiring several anthropologists
to work out of the NMFS Northeast Fisheries
Science Center in Woods Hole Massachusetts. That the
new hires are primarily anthropolgists suggests already
that community is within the domain of culture rather
than an ontological category within bioeconomics (of
which NMFS has many specialists) (cf. Olson, 2005).
Finally, there have been several funding initiatives
designed to produce new methods and standards for
assessing communities as well as funding designed to
target cooperative research between standard fisheries
science and fishers/fishing communities.11
The following examples are all relevant to the fisheries
science and management system in the Northeast.
They suggest a particular place for community relative
to the essential economic understanding of fisheries via
bioeconomics; that place is both a discursive location
outside the domain of the economic and a literal location
where community resides on land while the
processes of economy are at sea.
5. Economic impact analyses
The New England Fisheries Management Council
produces detailed reports designed to assess the economic
and social impacts of FMPs. While such reports
were in the past devoid of fishing communities, more recent
FMPs have been supplemented by analyses explicitly
addressing impacts on and implications for fishing
communities. Most EIAs use standard dealer data to
10
Fishery Management Plans (FMPs) exist for viturally all species of
fish that are commercially harvested in the Northeast (or in the case of
ÔgroundfishÕ, a collection of species harvested using the same bottom
trawling technology). FMPs are periodically amended in response to
scientific findings and/or pressure from various organizations.
11
The author has participated in several such projects including
‘‘Recreational Fishing and National Standard 8: Assessing Community
Impacts of Federal Regulations’’ (funded by NOAA via the
NMFS CMER program) and ‘‘An Atlas-based Audit of Fishing
Territories, Local Knowledge, and the Potential for Community
Participation in Fisheries Science and Management’’ (funded by
NOAA via the Northeast Consortium).
178 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
assess recent economic changes in relation to changes in
fish stock and fishing regulations. The data consist of
seafood dealers receipts of fish bought from harvesters
by port and state. Knowing not only quantity but also
value of landings allows for detailed economic analyses
focused on change over time, regional multiplier effects,
and economic projections given new regulations that
would alter landings quantities and composition. The
analyses also suggest a particular image of community
as the effect of market oriented economic activity by
reducing community health to revenues by region. Mapping
economic impact makes clear the terrestrial location
of community and a relationship to the commons
expressed only in terms of gross revenues. Fig. 2 is from
an economic analysis report (NEFMC, 2001) and shows
the locations of ‘‘community groups’’ such that their
relationship with the commons and their effect on the
economy of fishing is difficult to imagine.
6. Social impact analyses
The SIAs produced by the council, like the EIAs, suggest
the existence of communities insofar as they assess
port locations and coastal regions where fishers may reside
or dock their boats. There is, however, no connection
between the ports or regions specified and
particular areas at sea. This disconnection is symptomatic
of the disconnection between the discursive domains
of culture/community and economy/individual. Other
related work, however, that assesses the social impact
of particular fisheries management options attempts to
incorporate this at-sea aspect of fishing communities
(e.g. McCay et al., 2002a,b). This work utilizes Vessel
Trip Report (VTR) data collected by the National Marine
Service and database query techniques developed by
the author (St. Martin, 2004). This data set consists of
reports submitted by vessel captains that detail gear
use, catch, discards, and, importantly, vessel location
for each fishing trip. Using the trip locations of individual
boats, which themselves can be linked to particular
ports, McCay et al. attempt to address the absence of
any link between community and harvesting areas.
Using GIS techniques, the social impact of management
options that involve the closure of some area at
sea (as is becoming increasingly popular) is assessed.
As in the example of the Squid, Mackeral, Butterfish
SIA (McCay et al., 2002a), VTR data were used to find
out which boats fished in the proposed closed area,
where those boats were from, and what percent of the
catch landed came from the proposed closure area
(Fig. 3). This straightforward analysis had not been
done previously and represented a new image of fishing
where communities could be linked to specific areas.
This database query analysis produces sites that are
impacted by changes in fishing effort, principally reductions
in effort as specified by each fishery management
plan. The locating of impact in specific locations, ports,
communities, suggests a much more heterogeneous fishing
industry than was previously imagined. There is not,
however, any extension of that community-based heterogeneity
into the sea itself; there is no translation of
community into an economic agent of harvest/production.
Community, in this case and in SIAs generally, is
a site of impact, a place removed from the bioeconomy
of fishing and its regulation. Individual fishermen, mobile
and independent (and conflated with boats), remain
the essential subject of fishing despite their residence in
Fig. 2. Source is Draft Summary Statistics for the Northeast Multispecies Fishery (NEFMC, 2001).
K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184 179
on-shore communities that are impacted by but not constitutive
of the fishing economy. Bioeconomics, even
after the explicit incorporation of community in fisheries
science and management, remains the sole arbiter of a
fishing economy devoid of community. While community
can, and must, be addressed, it remains outside
the domain of the economic and the subject of anthropology
and geography.
7. Other fora for community
In addition to EIA and SIA documents, the formal
management process, as instituted in the Northeast, consists
of many open meetings and other, often heated, public
forums where the voice of fishing communities is
heard.12
Unlike researcher analyses of community, these
forums allow fishers to speak for themselves. Many people
representing fishing communities appear and speak at
these meetings, submit statements and comments on
management actions, lobby government officials, and
interact with the media concerning management issues.
The language of fisheries science and management, itself
dedicated to enumerating and allocating quantities of
catch, translates virtually all community issues into a
struggle over the allocation of those quantities. All local
and community difficulties, disruptions, transformations,
and concerns are reduced to an insistence that management
not restrict harvesting; processes of community
are translated into the utility functions of individuals.
In addition, community concerns about specific areas at
sea, the site where utility is maximized, encounter fundamental
barriers. The scale of fishing and of fishersÕ environmental
observations is much smaller than that of
fisheries science and management. Their observations
of pollution events, environmental degradation, particular
flora or fauna, and quantities of species are simply not
compatible with the observations and analysis performed
by fisheries scientists at the regional or supra-regional
scale (Clay, 1996). The connections that fishers have with
particular areas offshore as expressed in their local
knowledge are largely ignored by fisheries science and
management. In this process of public participation, the
communities that fishers represent are reduced to the desires
of individuals to increase harvest and are disconnected
from any location at-sea. Despite the high levels
of public participation, the boundaries that enclose the
domain of economy remain firm.
Callari (2004) implies that the second path to othering,
the movement of community/culture to the outside
of economic space, is a discursive rather than literal
Fig. 3. An example of the use of GIS and spatial data to assess the impacts of area closures.
12
The author was a participant observer of council and council
committee meetings while doing research as a National Research
Council Associate with NMFS at the Northeast Fisheries Science
Center (2000–2001).
180 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
geographic move. While this is true, in contemporary
fisheries in the Northeast this discursive disciplining
has a geographic expression as well; the economic space,
the abstract space of objectified resources that is reified
by bioeconomic discourse, is geographically separate
from the terrestrial locations of community reifed by
anthropological discourse. The discursive divide is
inscribed into the landscape of fishing by a geographic
divide that preserves the domain of the economic as
ruled by particular ontological elements that do not
include or are not influenced by community. This second
divide resolves the problems associated with the insertion
of community by placing community outside the
space of fisheries resources and placing it outside the
essential economic logic around which fisheries science
and management continues to revolve.
8. (Re)placing community
The dominant discourse of fisheries science and management
provides no future for communities in terms of
their participation in the economy of fisheries. That is,
communities may be considered in the management process
but only in terms of the impacts of regulations, as
essentially the residence of individual fishermen or as
the ports out of which their boats operate. Such communities
are severed from the space of fisheries resources
and, hence, the site of essential economic processes;
the degree to which communities might constitute,
understand, and work together on a fisheries commons
is made invisible. The potential for communities and
community economies, relative to the commons, is
located only in distant locations peripheral to the industrial/capitalist
economy. The few places where communities
can be mapped onto the commons in the
Northeast are in locations that are seen as remnant
and pre-modern (e.g. the legally identified traditional
fishing grounds surrounding Monhegan Island, ME).
While ‘‘traditional’’ fishing communities have always
been visible and active in the Northeast and are now categorically
incorporated into science and management,
their presence within the economic space of fishing has
arguably been silenced and their presence recognized
only outside. The disciplining of fisheries, even in the
industrial Northeast, is, however, never complete. There
remain traces of the other, of community and territory,
within the identity of the dominant subject and space. It
is within this economic space that the presence of the
other must be revealed if we are to open the future of
fisheries to more than narrowly conceived neoliberal
privatization schemes (cf. Mansfield, 2004). In fisheries,
the economic space that is the domain of bioeconomics
parallels the physical at-sea locations of harvesting, as
seen earlier. Therefore, the degree to which community
can be mapped, literally, onto the commons is the degree
to which community can be inserted into the economic
space of fishing, the domain of bioeconomics.
There is a fundamental difference, then, between
mapping (and here mapping means actual maps as well
as representations derived from ethnographies, interviews,
focus groups, etc.) terrestrial sites of community
and mapping their presence at-sea. The former reduces
community to a residence, separate from the essential
economic dynamic of fisheries. The latter suggests a role
for community in determining where and how fishing effort
is produced, and it implies a unit of analysis that
would go beyond an assumed individual fisherman to
the investigation of the variety of social relations that
make up community (here we can imagine, amongst
other processes, class relations between owners, operators,
and crew as relevant to production and distribution
decision-making). Mapping community onto the commons,
in short, suggests an opening, a place from which
to produce a new discourse of community and commons
where the former is fundamental to the constitution of
the latter.
Fig. 4 is but one example of how community can be
produced on the commons in the Northeast. Using the
same NMFS data that was used to map the impacts of
area closures on particular communities (see Fig. 3), it
is possible to map not from commons to community
(e.g. to assess the impacts of area closures) but from
community to commons (e.g. where do fishers from a
particular port regularly fish together?). Fig. 4a shows
fishing vessel trip locations (thousands of tiny dots) for
selected Mid-Atlantic ports. In the aggregate, which is
how this data is typically utilized, community presence
is difficult to discern; after selecting and categorizing
by port of origin (or any number of community associations
such as gear type, boat size, or crew size), however,
community territories begin to emerge. Standard
spatial statistical techniques can then be applied to
gauge clustering, reveal the differential patterns of
unique communities and/or ports, and produce zones
representing areas of importance by community. Fig. 4b
clearly shows the differential nature of fishing zones
for the same Mid-Atlantic ports (e.g. Point Pleasant
and Montauk show relatively proximate territories while
Wanchese and Hampton boats are much more wide
ranging). Mapping community onto the commons, here
a literal mapping, is vital if the category of community is
to have more meaning than simply a site of economic
impact, if it is to be seen as integral to the economic
dynamic of fishing.
Vessel trip report data contains the locations of fishing
trips and makes possible the representation of communities
on the commons. Importantly, this data also
records the number of crew members on board a vessel
during any given trip. The latter information hints at the
potential to broaden the image of community not only
in spatial terms but also in terms of the multiple
K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184 181
economic positions of fishers themselves and the social
relations amongst them. Positioning vessels between
community and commons clearly suggests their role
as a vehicle of surplus from commons to community;
identifying the multiplicity of fishers on board a boat reveals
how that surplus is distributed amongst fishers and
within communities. In most fisheries, fishers are compensated
not by a wage but by a share of the catch13
;
their pay is more a function of the health of the commons
and the skill of the captain than a struggle over
wages with capital. Insofar as fishers are members of
wider communities, fishing communities are directly
linked to the commons as a source of wealth unmediated
or obscured by a wage relationship. Clearly, all fishers
and fishing communities do not act as stewards of the
commons; their peculiar system of compensation does,
however, indicate a community presence and economic
interest relative to the commons itself. That is, the share
system links communities, rather than individual fishermen
conflated with individual vessels, directly to the
commons and suggests at least a trace of a community
economic dynamic.
9. Conclusion
The discourse of fisheries science and management
that has evolved in the North Atlantic successfully displaces
community and culture from the essential economic
dynamic of fisheries. Fisheries, understood as
an economy constituted by a particular economic subject
(i.e. the utility maximizing fisherman) and space
(i.e. the abstract space of resources open to appropriation),
becomes a site flawed by deficient property rights.
The goal of this dominant discourse is to enclose fisheries,
to constitute it as within the singular and hegemonic
economy of capitalism by instituting a new regime of
property rights. Private property (and a neoliberal approach
generally) becomes the only solution and future
toward which fisheries management must strive. Alternative
economies such as those based on the presence
of community as integral to economy are impossible
to imagine. Such economies, through the lens of a
property historicism, are always seen as either before
or beyond the dominant economic formation.
The category of community is, however, crossing the
boundary into the domain of the dominant economy.
With political ecology and, in this case, fisheries social
science as traveling companions, community, once
Fig. 4. (a) depicts actual trip locations in the Mid-Atlantic region. Those that are colored originated in one of the five highlighted ports. (b) depicts
zones (derived from the same data) of primary and secondary importance to the same ports.
13
The share system is thought to be an effective mechanism for
accommodating the uncertainty of fishing (Doeringer et al., 1986;
Doeringer and Terkla, 1995). Eliminating such uncertainty is, however,
one of the primary aims of fisheries science and management and such
a move suggests a potential for the implementation of new social
relations in fishing that would include wage relations.
182 K.St. Martin / Geoforum 37 (2006) 169–184
relegated to peripheral and/or third world locations, is
beginning to appear with greater frequency within the
first world. In fisheries, the presence of community (and
associated cultural processes) is a direct challenge to the
ontological foundations of fisheries bioeconomics, and
fisheries science and management generally; once visible,
community disrupts the assumed subject and space of
fisheries economies. For the dominant discourse to be
maintained, community must be (dis)placed such that
the domain of the economic remains devoid of community,
culture, common territories, etc. What emerges is
a particular understanding of community such that it is
ontologically present but outside the discursive space of
economy. Community can be identified, documented,
and analyzed but always only as a site of economic impact
and never as a constituent of the economic; the space
of the economic remains populated by individual fishermen
and understood via bioeconomics while community
is relegated to culture and understood via anthropology.
Curiously, this disciplining of community has a literal
geographic dimension: the discursive domain of bioeconomics
corresponds to the spatial domain of fisheries resources
themselves while that of fisheries social science/
anthropology corresponds to the terrestrial locations of
fishers residences. Fishing ports become the place of community
while the actual common property resource remains
the site where the essential economic dynamic
reigns uncompromised. The recent inscription of community
such that it is severed from the common resources
upon which it depends makes difficult any attempt to see
community as foundational to economy. Through a
(re)mapping of community onto the commons, however,
communities might be seen to inhabit the commons, produce
environmental knowledge about the commons,
facilitate and/or constrain fishing effort on the commons,
and act as potential managers of the commons. In this
case, alternative mappings and other forms of representation
open the economic space that was once enclosed by
bioeconomic discourse to the possibility of community
and a community-based economy of fisheries.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Richard Schroeder, Marianna
Pavlovskaya, and other, anonymous, reviewers who
provided valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper.
I would also like to thank Steven Edwards, Bonnie
McCay, Julia Olsen, and Eric Thunberg for the many
conversations that informed this work as well as the
Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts
where an earlier version of this paper was presented
as part of their colloquium series (November
2003). Finally, thank you to NOAAÕs Cooperative Marine
Education and Research (CMER) program that
helped fund the research for this article.
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