Abstract

In a post-industrial economy, it is as important to understand “material” productive processes in the local community as the processes through which global value chains “expropriate” or “co-opt” common immaterial assets. However, the literature on collective action and the management of common goods generally focuses on matters of the control and governance of material resources. The article commences with an analysis of the relations between the production of value, collective action and the rentier nature of contemporary capitalism and its entrepreneurial ideology. Then, we present a detailed analysis of the case of mytilid seed capture in the Reloncavi Estuary (Los Lagos Region, Chile). This case shows us the failure of modernisation policies which are based on converting local producers into modern entrepreneurs. To adopt a successful value strategy, a very different problem must be addressed, namely the difficulties of local communities in managing successfully their own common immaterial values. Faced with the dichotomous logic of neoliberalism, communities must reunite these immaterial values and the associated common material resources, and modulate the friction between them.

Highlights

  • In recent decades, special attention has been paid to the collective action underlying the reproduction of common goods such as forests, fishery resources or local farm production (Agrawal, 2001)

  • Global assemblies where conflicts and negotiations can develop over the co-optation, capture and expropriation of such collective symbolic capital are as important as local management of material production

  • The pressures exercised by other actors in the value chain have resulted in a dynamic of expropriation of the collective symbolic capital by these “finders-keepers”

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Summary

Introduction

Special attention has been paid to the collective action underlying the reproduction of common goods such as forests, fishery resources or local farm production (Agrawal, 2001). Some seed collection takes place in areas managed by artisanal fishermen and farming associations (as in the Reloncaví Estuary), and some fattening is managed by local and national micro-businesses, both segments contain large companies (including some Spanish ones).

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