Captured and Converting: The Institutionalisation of Small Boat Fishing and the Demise of Fisher Self-Management

Abstract

"In this essay we contend that the traditional self-management practices of Atlantic Canadian fishers, practices reflecting the principles of cooperative self-reliance, occasional solidarity, and informal management of access to and use of ocean resources, are being exorcised through both the direction of fisheries economic development and its companion, federal government fisheries management policy. We employ a secondary analysis of data concerning the socio-economic development of the fisheries, evaluation of fisheries management policy, and the consequent institutionalization of small boat fishers for the purpose of examining and documenting our contention. We argue that small boat fisher institutionalization over the last thirty years has seeded and cultivated a utilitarian rationality that has little reference to or regard for tradition property rights and local-level informal access-management practices."