Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places, and Power

Introduction

Bonnie J. McCay

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874059.ch1

The marine frontier of the North Pacific is wild and dangerous and often lucrative, but its frontier status is changing. Fisheries were once open to all comers willing to risk boats, gear, and lives to reap salmon, crab, Pacific Hippoglossus stenolepis halibut, and other fish for subsistence and commercial use. Almost all fisheries are now tightly restricted, open only to those who hold privileged access rights. Some of those rights have come to be treated as marketable property. To many observers, such privatization of the ocean is seen as necessary if the oceans’ resources are to be properly managed (Hannesson 2004). To others, its costs and effects threaten livelihoods and cherished values.

The intent of this volume, which is largely based on papers delivered at a session of the American Anthropological Association annual meeting in San Jose, California, in November 2006, is to explore the human dimensions of privatization of the oceans, focusing on the U.S. and Canadian fishing communities of the North Pacific but with a nod to Iceland and New Zealand. How has privatization, or what is euphemistically called “rationalization,” been experienced by and affected the livelihoods and life chances of people dependent on fishing for livelihood, sustenance, and identity?

The story of the domestication and enclosure of North Pacific fisheries is a story of the emergence of a neoliberal policy in marine resource management (Mansfield 2004a, 2004b), marked by an ideology that privileges markets as the major source of governance in human affairs. In order to work properly, markets require secure, exclusive, clearly bounded, and transferable property rights. From this perspective, the problem with fisheries is a property rights problem, given the natural, cultural, and political factors that have kept fish and fishing from being privatized. Indeed, one might reframe the “tragedy of the commons” (Hardin 1968) as “the fisherman’s problem” because ocean fishing so dramatically exemplifies the challenges to sustainable use of relatively open-access, common pool resource systems (McEvoy 1986). With better property rights, participants in fishing can make decisions that lead to more rational investments in boats, gear, labor, and time, avoiding the situation often cast as too many fishermen, too few fish. The problem with this analysis, as revealed in this volume, is that it minimizes or ignores the human dimension of fishing; the social, cultural, and personal costs of privatizing the fisheries; and the potentials of alternatives.