A political ecology of fisheries

Abstract

One of the central lessons harshly underscored by the collapse of northern cod stocks is that the relation between catch per unit of effort and stock abundance is problematic. It is confounded by local knowledge. But social scientists, with disciplinary training in the collection and interpretation of local knowledge, have made little contribution to this, and other problems in fisheries management. This commentary briefly reviews several contested issues in maritime social science: the skipper effect, fleet dynamics, folk management, scientific management, and adaptations to chaotic systems. It suggests that the debates, and much of the fine-grained empirical work underlying them, evolved in the context of largely academic contests over paradigms such as cultural ecology, political economy, and recently, political ecology.