Liam Campling

Swimming Upstream: Market Access for African Fish Exports in the Context of WTO and EU Negotiations and Regulation

The changing nature of the international trade regime presents a series of new challenges to fish industries on the African continent. This article explores how WTO and EU trade negotiations and regulation impact market-access possibilities for African fish exports. It comes to the conclusion that while bilateral negotiations with the EU have been beneficial for some African countries, collective bargaining power in the context of Economic Partnership Agreements might produce more strategic outcomes in the medium term.

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.

A Critical Political Economy of the Small Island Developing States Concept

The 1994 Declaration of Barbados and the Barbados Programme of Action (BPOA) was a watershed in the scale and scope of international cooperation between small island developing states (SIDS). It was also the beginning of a heightened international concern with the particularities of SIDS developmental trajectories, constraints and opportunities. However, while the Declaration opens with the affirmation that ‘sustainable development programmes must seek to enhance the quality of life of peoples, including their health, well-being and safety’, it does not affirm the centrality of island peoples as key agents in this development. In order to investigate this issue, this article demonstrates historical shifts in SIDS discourse and provides a critical evaluation of contemporary claims for the particularity of SIDS. It goes on to critically assess empirical and theoretical examples of South–South cooperation in order to generate possible insights for the SIDS grouping. The article argues that for the genuine ‘sustainable development’ of SIDS, a popular democratic base of island citizens must exist within island societies that in turn cooperate and coordinate–including material, political-social and operational linkages–across the spatially disparate regions of the global oceans. It is suggested that only through the heightened consciousness of island citizens of linkages across oceanic regions and their explicit incorporation as social agents to complement and, if required, counter inter state negotiations and strategies can contemporary forms of inter-island cooperation in the global ‘South’ be sustained.

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.

Social Policies in Seychelles

SOCIAL POLICIES IN SMALL STATES SERIES The country case studies and thematic papers in this series examine social policy issues facing small states and the implications for economic development. They show how, despite their inherent vulnerability, some small states have been successful in improving their social indicators because of the complementary social and economic policies they have implemented. CASE STUDY – SEYCHELLES Seychelles has one of the most extensive social policy programmes in the developing world, and has been identified as a model for the rest of Africa. As a small state, however, it remains economically vulnerable and in 2008 had to accept a financial rescue package from the IMF. This book provides comprehensive analysis of social policy development in the country from the colonial era onwards, focusing on the political and economic developments that have led to the current situation. The challenge now is to maintain current levels of social policy interventions in the face of severe indebtedness and the stagnation of economic growth.

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.

Class dynamics of development: a methodological note

Abstract This article argues that class relations are constitutive of development processes and central to understanding inequality within and between countries. Class is conceived as arising out of exploitative social relations of production, but is formulated through and expressed by multiple determinations. The article illustrates and explains the diversity of forms of class relations, and the ways in which they interplay with other social relations of dominance and subordination, such as gender and ethnicity. This is part of a wider project to revitalise class analysis in the study of development problems and experiences.

Capitalism and the sea: Sovereignty, territory and appropriation in the global ocean:

This paper introduces the term ‘terraqueous territoriality’ to analyse a particular relationship between capitalism as a social formation, and the sea as a natural force. It focuses on three spaces – exclusive economic zones, the system of ‘flags of convenience’ and multilateral counter-piracy initiatives – as instances of capitalist states and firms seeking to transcend the geo-physical difference between firm land and fluid sea. Capital accumulation, it is argued here, seeks to territorialise the sea through forms of sovereignty and modes of appropriation drawn from experiences on land, but in doing so encounters particular tensions thereby generating distinctive spatial effects. By exploring the articulation between sovereignty, territory and appropriation in the organisation of spaces where land meets sea, the article seeks to demonstrate the value of an analytical framework that underlines the terraqueous nature of contemporary capitalism.

Natural resource industries as global value chains: Frontiers, fetishism, labour and the state

Despite 30 years of research on global value chains, the appropriation of nature in general and natural resource industries in particular remain marginal both theoretically and empirically. There is a parallel ecological deficit in labour process theory and a lack of applied research on natural resource industries. But since historical capitalism is based on the expanding appropriation and transformation of nature by labour, these lacunae must be redressed. Contributing to an emerging body of work in environmental economic geography and the international political economy of the environment, this article theorises global value chains through the lens of the circuit of capital as a tool to unravel some distinctive features of natural resources industries. We propose a framework for the study of natural resource industries as global value chains based on five propositions: (a) commodity frontier theory, (b) the fetishism of natural resources, (c) the socio-ecological indeterminacy of the labour process, (d) distance and durability in the production of time and (e) the contingency of the capitalist state in (re)producing global value chains. While far from exhaustive, we argue that this original synthetic framework provides crucial bases for a research agenda on global value chains in natural resources.