Becky Mansfield

Rules of Privatization: Contradictions in Neoliberal Regulation of North Pacific Fisheries

Abstract Recent changes in fisheries regulation in the U.S. North Pacific reveal how neoliberalism is constituted in practice, and the forms that neoliberalism takes when it engages with environmental management and ecological processes. Whereas neoliberalism can be taken as a political economic philosophy that posits that markets, without state involvement, can best allocate resources, the history and practice of neoliberalism show that it is not as unified as it often appears. Analysis of contemporary fisheries policy reveals not only contradictions in neoliberal approaches, but also how those contradictions are shaped by the environmental context of the industry. This article discusses the rationale for neoliberalism in fisheries and the governance changes enacted in the 1998 American Fisheries Act, which privatized the fishery for Alaska pollock by closing the fishery to all new entrants, providing a set percentage of the yearly catch to “cooperatives” of participants, and allowing individuals to lease their shares. Karl Polanyis notion of the “double movement” provides a framework to argue that even though regulators tout these reforms because they rely on market mechanisms to resolve recalcitrant ecological and economic problems in these fisheries, writing and implementing the act simultaneously involved complex rule making designed to protect the market. This form of neoliberalism results from the history of fisheries regulation, including recent emphasis on cooperative management, and the ecological characteristics of marine fish. Moves to privatize the oceans entail developing distinctive forms of neoliberal practice that uniquely combine private industry and government regulation. Because fish are one of the last great resource commons, neoliberal approaches to fisheries mark a profound geographical transformation in the political economy of the oceans.

Fish, factory trawlers, and imitation crab:the nature of quality in the seafood industry

As the last major food that is primarily wild-caught, fish offers unique perspectives on relationships among nature, quality, and agro-food production. Developing a case study of changing constructions of quality in the global surimi seafood industry, this paper explores how ideas about quality are not simply social constructions that have material effects, but are complex interactions between natural inputs and their environments, production techniques and technologies, and foods and their uses. Surimi is a fish paste made from a variety of fish species, including Alaska pollock, the largest fishery in the world, and is used to make a variety of seafood products, including both traditional Japanese fish cakes and imitation seafood products (e.g. ‘krab’), which is the most common form in the US and Europe. Drawing on recent approaches to relationality, the analysis treats product quality neither as a purely objective measure nor subjective judgment, but instead as an assemblage of interactions at multiple stages of commodity chains. Analysis of how quality in the surimi industry has changed as production and consumption have moved to new places, and how quality then affects patterns of production and consumption, reveals that physical characteristics of the fish, and the environments from which they come, play key roles in quality definitions. Yet at the same time, which characteristics count as quality is defined within the production networks. Rather than focusing on relationships between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, analysis of individual production networks elucidates how specific aspects of what we call ‘the natural world’ participate in specific interactions. The key is not whether natural processes put constraints on economic activities or whether economic actors are able to outflank nature through technical innovation, but rather how specific elements and activities within production networks define each other in their interactions.

The implications of environmental epigenetics A new direction for geographic inquiry on health, space, and nature-society relations

The emergent field of environmental epigenetics, which studies health effects of ‘xenobiotic’ chemicals, fundamentally challenges standard models of the biochemical pathways that shape bodies and human health. This article explores the implications of these discoveries for geographic knowledge in the nature-society and spatial traditions of human health, both of which have tended to black-box the material, biochemical body and treat the environment as an inert setting. Discoveries in epigenetics suggest that the environment is a biochemically active inducer of phenotypical development. In addition, understandings of the delayed temporality and intergenerational effects of epigenetic mechanisms challenge methodologies that privilege space.

Spatializing Globalization: A “Geography of Quality” in the Seafood Industry

Abstract The sociospatial structure of global industries may be characterized by difference and plurality as much as by the coordination of practices over space. One important factor that shapes these dynamics in contemporary food industries is the quality of products. Challenging recent perspectives that define quality as an alternative to global, industrial forms of production, this analysis finds that quality is also important for industrial food production and for the global geography of the surimi seafood industry. Surimi, a fish paste used in a wide assortment of products, such as fish cakes and imitation crab, was once exclusively Japanese. Now, this industry is global in scope, with production and consumption encompassing sites across Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Interactions among types of products, market differences, processing strategies, and the characteristics of fish form fluid definitions of product quality that shape patterns of supply and demand within the global industry. Terming these spatial interactions a “geography of quality,” this article shows that differences in how quality is constructed influence the development of dynamic transnational trade patterns and new regional industries in each market. This changing geography of quality provides insight into the creation and maintenance of a geographically differentiated yet still global-scale industry. The geography of quality in this industry is such that relative dis-integration between different commodity chains characterizes the movement toward global-scale production and consumption.

From catfish to organic fish: making distinctions about nature as cultural economic practice

Abstract This paper addresses the cultural economy of nature and the material culture of economic practice. Attending to ways that cultural notions about the biophysical world play key roles in political economic conflicts, discussion centers on two recent debates involving the cultural economy of seafood production and trade. The first debate is over whether the label “catfish” should include catfish imported from Vietnam into the United States; the second deals with whether fish and shellfish should be eligible to be certified “organic” under new US regulations. Analysis reveals that the key dynamic in these debates is not necessarily how people think about “nature”, but instead is how people make distinctions about the world. Rather than focusing on what is natural or not, key actors make distinctions among both organisms and environments. The ways that different groups define and enclose the biophysical world works to distinguish places as either appropriate or not for certain kinds of production activities. The overall argument is that significance and meaning of the biophysical become implicated in economic geographies by making distinctions about the world that then become important for how economic activity can work. As such, cultural economic approaches should attend to the ways that the biophysical is involved in relations such as competition and international trade, while nature–society approaches should shift focus from Nature to specific aspects of the biophysical world.

Biodiversity, Purity, and Death: Conservation Biology as Biopolitics

This paper draws on the Foucauldian notion of biopower to renarrate the development of conservation science in the US as a form of liberal biopolitical rule. With its emphasis on making nature live, conservation marks a shift away from a sovereign form of rule that emphasized subduing and controlling nature; today, nature is ruled not by the sword but by science. Through a discussion of key concepts in conservation biology—populations in crisis; evolution and its future orientation; extinction as death that is necessary for life; and diversity as purity—we illustrate the truth discourses, underlying logics, and calculative technologies by which distinctions within nonhuman life are made and made meaningful. We argue that conservation is biopolitical not just in that it moves from controlling individuals to statistically managing populations and species, but also in that it extends the racialized logic of abnormality in its core notions of biological diversity and purity. In the logics of conservation and race, life produces diversity, conceived as variety of biological kinds; within that diversity exist kinds that foster ongoing life, which should be maximized, and kinds that are threats, which should be let die in the name of life in general.

Scale framing of scientific uncertainty in controversy over the Endangered Steller sea lion

Abstract Political debate about the endangered Steller sea lion turns on uncertainty about the cause of decline and lack of recovery of this marine mammal of the North Pacific Ocean. To shift the political terrain, different groups tried to shift the scale at which problems are framed. US regulators focused on localised interactions, environmental organisations highlighted the entire fishery management regime and the fishing industry focused on natural climate change within the North Pacific region. Because debate is about supposedly objective, scientific realities, these practices of scale framing take on particular significance in this case. Scientific understandings of individual problems are not outside the frame of scale practices, but instead there is a politics of scale around science. This case shows that using scale as a framing device is a powerful political strategy for dealing with uncertainty, because focusing on a particular scale presupposes certain kinds of solutions while foreclosing others.

‘Imitation crab’ and the material culture of commodity production

Addressing the material culture of commodity production, this paper focuses on different and shifting meanings that are developed within and incorporated into the production of consumer goods. Analysis of the geographical production of individual consumer goods provides insight into the ways that social interactions ascribe meanings to things without erasing the material nature of those things. A case study of the Euro-American ‘imitation crab’ industry is used to examine how producers de- and re-contextualize commodities both materially and symbolically throughout production processes. By distancing imitation crab from both its physical origin as a fish and its social origin as a Japanese food product, firms are able to present this inexpensive and mass-produced commodity as a substitute for an expensive food. Instead of taking commodity forms for granted, this paper takes as its central method the analysis of these forms and their material-symbolic transformations. Cultural economic analysis of material production highlights key moments in the social geography of things, and the importance of these things in both daily life and social relations over time and space.

Epigenetic life: biological plasticity, abnormality, and new configurations of race and reproduction

Environmental epigenetics is a ‘hot’ new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms that influence how genes are expressed. It offers a dynamic and non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between environments, genes, bodies, and health. We ask how this new science of biological plasticity is changing existing concepts of normality and abnormality. We find that epigenetics is contributing to a new biological (yet non-determinist) ontology of race and that the fetus and reproductive women are emerging as the central figures in this new epigenetic model of race and bodily plasticity. We find that epigenetics is a science of variation in which biological difference is figured as both normal (inevitable) and abnormal (a sign of disruption); it then seeks to improve life by identifying therapies to cure epigenetic ‘abnormalities’. In this way, epigenetics emerges as a reproductive science, in which the ‘uterine environment’ is figured as the key space–time of epigenetic becoming. We argue that in this focus on abnormality and improvement, epigenetics is tied to a eugenic logic, even as it rejects notions of genetic determinism. While it might seem that epigenetic models of plastic life should eliminate race by eliminating notions of discrete kinds given in nature, it appears that epigenetics offers a new form of racialization based on reproductive processes of becoming rather than on pre-given nature.

Property Regime or Development Policy? Explaining Growth in the U.S. Pacific Groundfish Fishery

Researchers often blame problems in fisheries on the property regime under which a fishery is practiced. Depending on their perspective, researchers locate the cause of problems in either common property or open access regimes. However, because these approaches rely on the assumption of the “economically rational individual,” they obfuscate the specific cultural, political, and economic practices that shape resource use. Analysis of the U.S. Pacific groundfish fishery shows that growth and subsequent problems in this fishery are the result of a state-led fisheries development program implemented through a series of national, regional, and local policies designed to extend sovereign control to include ocean territory. These policies both created a climate of fisheries development and provided the means by which the fishery could grow. This analysis highlights the need to examine historic and geographic specificity to explain resource use, rather than relying upon generalized models that posit a deterministic relationship between property regimes and socioenvironmental outcomes.