Mapping Economic Diversity in the First World: The Case of Fisheries

Abstract

Fisheries are understood within a binary frame that is both spatialized into the First and Third Worlds and founded upon a developmentalist discourse of fisheries that produces the conditions for capitalism. The result is an inevitable march toward privatization of resources abstractly understood and their utilization by individuals as capital. The Third World is allowed to diverge from this inevitability because of its inherent characteristics of subject and space read as fisheries-based community and territory. These different imaginaries of subject and space produce very different prescriptions for economic development; the First World must choose capitalism whereas the Third World might explore other options, albeit at a local scale. Producing alternative forms of fisheries management in the First World, then, requires both a strategy of valuing that which has been relegated to the periphery (for example, community, cooperation, and participation) as well as a blurring of binary categories generally. Undermining the presence of capitalism in the First World and making space for that which has been excluded (for example, community-based and territorial fisheries) requires a new economic and spatial imaginary.