Private Oceans: The Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas

by Fiona McCormack

As the era of thriving small-scale fishing communities continues to wane, Fiona McCormack opens a window into contemporary fisheries quota systems and explores how neoliberalism has become entangled with our approach to environmental management. Grounded in fieldwork and participant observation in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland, and Hawaii, Private Oceans offers a comparative analysis of the processes of privatization in ecosystem services and traces how value has been repositioned in the market away from productive activities, ultimately causing broad collapse of fishing communities worldwide.
 

216 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2017

Reviews

[Sarah Ensor · Rating 3 out of 5]

Neoliberalism, the restructuring of global capitalism that has taken place since the 1970s, has made commercial fishing vastly more profitable for corporations and large boat owners. Fish and ordinary fishers have fared much worse. Our oceans face overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and a biodiversity crisis driven by warming water linked to climate change, while government policies exclude thousands of ordinary people from commercial fishing. 

Private Oceans examines the effects of one of the main causes of this exclusion, Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs), pioneered in the 1980s in New Zealand fisheries, and further developed in Iceland through the 1990’s and now an intrinsic part of the Common Fisheries Policies (CFP) of the European Union . Full review at, https://www.google.com/amp/s/climatea...