Abstract
This paper contributes to the growing body of literature that engages with ontological scholarship on fisheries management and governance, and more generally, to debates on environmental governance. It argues that fisheries governance is an ontological challenge that raises questions of culture, equity, legitimacy and inclusion/exclusion, requiring more context-sensitive and politically aware fisheries governance approaches. By engaging with the concept of political ontology, and drawing from empirical research carried out in Ireland’s offshore islands, five ontological assumptions are identified that underpin Irish fisheries governance and management policies and practices and categorised as social-historical, ecological, geographical, technocratic and markets-driven. Articulating and examining these assumptions provide insights into why policy objectives aimed at supporting small-scale fisheries and their communities may, in practice, not be effective when they are operationalised within a governance paradigm designed around the realities of large-scale, full-time, highly mobile and more economically productive operators. Despite the efforts of ontologically disobedient islanders, the enactment of these ontological assumptions into the dominant world of fisheries governance inhibits the emergence of possible worlds that would enact Irish island inshore fisheries through island logics. The paper concludes that the squeeze on Ireland’s island inshore fishers is not simply spatial, it is ontological. A dominant fisheries ontology has been created by the interplay of ontological assumptions. This dominant ontology undermines the State’s critical policy to maintain and manage Irish fisheries as a public resource in order to avoid the concentration of fishing opportunities into the hands of large and powerful fishing interests.
Highlights
Despite calls for better integration of social, economic and cultural considerations in fisheries management (Urquhart et al 2013), fisheries policy instruments continue to frame fisheries governance as predominantly a technocratic challenge (Johnsen 2014; FAO 2021)
Political ontology has proved to be an effective conceptual tool to illustrate the relevance of ontological considerations to fisheries policy and governance
By attending to the different ontologies or worlds struggling to ensure their continued existence and the politicised nature of practices and processes that bring these different worlds into being (Blaser 2009b), I have identified five ontological assumptions that shape Irish fisheries governance approaches — social-historical, ecological, geographic, technocratic and markets-driven and that “are critical to understand given their ability to affect the material conditions of the fisheries and the socioeconomic lives of fishers”
Summary
Despite calls for better integration of social, economic and cultural considerations in fisheries management (Urquhart et al 2013), fisheries policy instruments continue to frame fisheries governance as predominantly a technocratic challenge (Johnsen 2014; FAO 2021). Following Boucquey et al (2016) and Blaser (2009b), I show how the stories that depict the performance of multiple ontologies reveal the ontological assumptions underpinning Irish fisheries governance approaches Probing these ontological assumptions provides insights into how, despite attempts to account for the worlds of small-scale fisheries in Irish fisheries management approaches and policy instruments, the dominant world enacted by those practices and instruments risks subordinating the small-scale fisheries worlds by continuing to reduce these worlds to its own (Blaser 2009b), and, in the process, rendering them invisible (DePuy et al 2021). Shared challenges include difficulties accessing fishing opportunities (in particular, valuable quota controlled stocks); competing with the more powerful medium and large-scale industrial interests for fish stocks and markets; obstacles to participation in fisheries governance (for example, through fish producer organisations who mainly represent medium to large-scale fleets); difficulties making their voices heard in systems that value and privilege high economic output ( small-scale fisheries generally represent the majority of their national fleets in terms of numbers of vessels and fishers, their economic output is dwarfed by that of the larger-scale members of the fleet whose power affords them seats at decision-making tables such as those that manage quota allocations); and being adversely impacted by policies that are designed around the fishing practices and management of larger vessels (Linke and Jentoft 2014; Frangoudes and Bellanger 2017; PascualFernández et al 2019; Pascual-Fernández et al 2020; Percy and O’Riordan 2020)
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