Elizabeth Havice

The problem of property in industrial fisheries

Fisheries systems are widely considered to be ‘in crisis’ in both economic and ecological terms, a considerable concern given their global significance to food security, international trade and employment. The most common explanation for the crisis suggests that it is caused by weak and illiberal property regimes. It follows that correcting the crisis involves the creation of private property rights that will restore equilibrium between the profitable, productive function of fishing firms and fish stocks in order to maximize ‘rent’. In this approach, coastal states are seen as passive, weak, failed and/or corrupted observers and facilitators of the fisheries crisis, unless they institute private property relations. This paper offers an alternative analysis by using the perspective of historical materialism to re-examine longstanding debates over the problem of property and its relation to ground-rent in industrial fisheries. It identifies coastal states as modern landed property, enabling an exploration of the existence of and struggles over surplus value, and drawing attention to the role of the state and the significance of the environmental conditions of production in understanding political-ecological conditions in fisheries. As on land, property in the sea is a site of social struggle and will always remain so under capitalism, no matter which juridical interest holds the property rights.

Articulating Upgrading: Island Developing States and Canned Tuna Production

Recently, researchers have drawn attention to an inclusionary bias in commodity chain research and proposed a ‘dis/articulations’ project aimed at drawing out how things included in, as well as excluded or expulsed from, production processes mutually, and often simultaneously, constitute commodity chains. The purpose of this paper is to situate the dis/articulations project in debates and policy proposals that identify ‘upgrading’ within a commodity chain as a pathway to development. We draw on foundational uses of the term ‘articulation’ in historical materialism to complicate linear notions of ‘upgrading as development’ before developing a framework for capturing the nonlinear dynamics of upgrading in a particular commodity chain. Our case study explains how small states that interact with the tuna commodity chain rise and fall (individually and in relation to each other), and have remained surprisingly relevant, though often at high cost, in competitive standardized manufacture. We suggest that, with careful attention to method in concept building, researchers can develop the dis/articulations project to create space for systematic assessment of the inclusionary bias in upgrading debates and policy formulations.

Mainstreaming environment and development at the World Trade Organization? Fisheries subsidies, the politics of rule-making, and the elusive 'triple win'

The relationship among trade liberalization, the environment, and socioeconomic development is marked by controversy, though it is well accepted that in practice economic interests often trump environmental concerns and that developing countries incur a range of costs to participate in, and comply with, multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. Politics and power dynamics in the rule-making process in liberalization negotiations are often implicated for generating these outcomes. To improve on this record, and in accordance with the rise in ‘market environmentalism’, World Trade Organization (WTO) members and advocacy groups have turned this rhetoric on its head and pushed for ‘synergy’ in which a single WTO rule to discipline fisheries subsidies at once liberalizes trade, generates an environmental improvement, and supports developing country aspirations—a much fêted ‘triple win’. We sketch the anatomy of the fisheries subsidies negotiations and explore how the triple win is used by blocks of states to justify different political—economic positions. This analysis sheds light on the challenges associated with seeking to use trade for the environment and for development and the dynamics that shape negotiations and the actually existing rules that emerge from the WTO.

Where Chain Governance and Environmental Governance Meet: Interfirm Strategies in the Canned Tuna Global Value Chain

abstract In value chain scholarship, chain governance is the relationship of power among firms in a production network. For economic geographers working on the environment, governance refers primarily to state- and nonstate-based institutional and regulatory arrangements shaping human–environment interactions. Yet the theoretical and empirical links between these two concepts of governance are opaque. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of the canned tuna value chain and a historic materialist method, we demonstrate how interfirm strategies over the appropriation of value and distribution of costs and risks work through the environment. We document moments of change in the value chain that enliven a dynamic understanding of how a lead firm becomes and reproduces its power, and strategies that subordinate firms deploy to try to counter the power of lead firms. We posit that these moves broaden value chain scholarship’s focus from governance typologies toward the gravitational tendencies of capitalist competition and that such tendencies are inextricable from the environmental conditions of production through which they are made possible. This approach enables us to look at value chains and the environmental conditions of production as mutually constitutive, helping to explain vexing modern environmental problems as a core element of the general tendencies, mechanisms, and drivers of power in chains.

Will a catch share for whales improve social welfare

We critique a proposal to use catch shares to manage transboundary wildlife resources with potentially high non-extractive values, and we focus on the case of whales. Because whales are impure public goods, a policy that fails to capture all nonmarket benefits (due to free riding) could lead to a suboptimal outcome. Even if free riding were overcome, whale shares would face four implementation challenges. First, a whale share could legitimize the international trade in whale meat and expand the whale meat market. Second, a legal whale trade creates monitoring and enforcement challenges similar to those of organizations that manage highly migratory species such as tuna. Third, a whale share could create a new political economy of management that changes incentives and increases costs for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to achieve the current level of conservation. Fourth, a whale share program creates new logistical challenges for quota definition and allocation regardless of whether the market for whale products expands or contracts. Each of these issues, if left unaddressed, could result in lower overall welfare for society than under the status quo.

Unsettled Sovereignty and the Sea: Mobilities and More-Than-Territorial Configurations of State Power

How do mobilities associated with oceans and the resources inside of them shape the spatial and temporal dimensions of state sovereignty? As an entry point into this question, this article explores the fifty-year, multistate struggle over access to, and control over, highly migratory tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean, focusing on the historical relationship among Pacific Island states, the United States, and the United States–flagged tuna fishing fleet. The analysis corroborates scholarship in resource geography and political geography that demonstrates that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis, enhancing it to show that the lively nature of oceans and mobile global capital extracting resources from them create a wide range of political possibilities for state influence. The findings reveal that to gain control over, or access to, mobile ocean resources, states construct and express sovereignty in relation to each other and the interests of global capital. At times, multiple and conflicting legal institutions and definitions of sovereignty over the same set of resources can simultaneously be in play. The result is temporally and spatially dynamic sovereignty that is continuously negotiated among “foreign” and “national” interests forced together by fluid ocean materialities and the mobile nature of transnational fishing capital vying for extraction privileges. This analysis reveals mobilities as generative of more-than-territorial institutional innovations that continuously remake the spatial contours of state sovereignty over resources.

The Nature of the Firm in Global Value Chains

Introduction The influence of ‘lead firms’ in the organization and structure of global value chains (GVCs) has been extensively addressed; however, less attention has been paid to firms’ permanent imperative to deal with the challenges and opportunities offered by nature. In this chapter, we draw out how relations of production inside of firms and relations of exchange among firms shape, and are shaped by, nature. Through a critical GVC analysis, we reclaim the essential – and often overlooked – focus on production as a fundamental moment in capitalism. We keep firms at the centre of the analysis by exploring chain governance and firm–nature dynamics. We find that the emphasis on inter-firm governance in GVC literature has generated an analytical focus on the sphere of circulation (i.e., exchange relations and the politics of buying and selling), to the neglect of the political-economic and ecological dynamics at points of production . We show that ecological dynamics are a driver of firm strategy across all nodes of value chains. Using the lens of nature deepens and broadens our understanding of firms and firm power in GVCs and enhances chain researchers’ explanations of the relationships among firms and the socio-economic outcomes of their activities. Our starting point is that global value chains, the firm and natural resources cannot be separated. The original material basis of most production involves the appropriation, transformation and exchange of natural resources by labour. This includes physical and intangible commodities, such as services and the products of immaterial labour for which natural resources still provide the means of production (electricity, keyboards), conditions of production (buildings, roads) or the conditions of reproduction (food, housing, transport). As put by Gavin Bridge (2009: 1218), ‘we live in a material world in which “the economy” is fundamentally (although not exclusively) a process of material transformation through which natural resources are converted into a vast array of commodities and by-product wastes’. Despite this, the intersections between firms and natural resources are an under-researched dimension of analyses using the global value chain (GVC) and global production network (GPN) frameworks (Smith and Mahutga, 2009). In GVC and GPN literature (from here, ‘GVC’), analyses rarely look at the strategies firms employ to produce raw materials and even more rarely at firms’ original appropriation of nature and attendant social relations.

The Global Environmental Politics and Political Economy of Seafood Systems

This article situates seafood in the larger intersection between global environmental governance and the food system. Drawing inspiration from the food regimes approach, we trace the historical unfolding of the seafood system and its management between the 1930s and the 2010s. In doing so, we bridge global environmental politics research that has studied either the politics of fisheries management or seafood sustainability governance, and we bring seafood and the fisheries crisis into food regimes scholarship. Our findings reveal that the seafood system has remained firmly dependent on the historical institutions of national seafood production systems and, particularly, on the state-based regulatory regimes that they promulgated in support of national economic and geopolitical interests. As such, seafood systems contribute to a broader, historicized understanding of the hybrid global environmental governance of food systems in which nonstate actors depend heavily upon, and in fact call for the strengthening of, state-based institutions. Our findings reveal that the contemporary private ordering of seafood governance solidifies the centrality of state-based institutions in the struggle for “sustainable” seafood and enables the continued expansionary, volume-driven extractivist logics that produced the fisheries crisis in the first place.

Exploring the Political Economy of Resource Systems through Coltan, Fish, Food, and Timber

Faced with the option of wild-caught Chilean sea bass or farmed shrimp, which should you select if you are worried about how your consumption might impact ocean ecosystems? Are the minerals in the circuit board of your cell phone fueling war and violence? Framing their books with these kinds of questions, the authors contributing to Polity’s “Resources” series suggest that most consumers lack knowledge of the natural and human conditions that provide basic human needs and luxury goods.1 Clapp argues that this gap arises because, while the components of “resource systems”—including resource production, exchange, consumption, and regulation—are increasingly complex and globalized, “the global political and economic dimensions of those systems are often left unpacked, are only partially examined, or are ignored altogether” (p. 5). The objective of each book is to offer a descriptive overview of one resource system, summarizing (1) its present and projected resource-use trends and associated environmental and socioeconomic outcomes, (2) the processes and institutions that determine how the resource enters and circulates through local and global economies, and (3) options for reducing or mitigating harmful dimensions of the resource system. Overall, the authors steer away from conceptual and theoretical engagement in favor of offering a clear and accessible de-