Paper short abstract:

This paper traces the evolution of sustainability programs, philosophies and practices in environmental governance, using the quota management system in fisheries as a case in point.

Paper long abstract:

Sustainability shows opportunistic like features by adding a moral orientation to a vast range of interests often pursuing contradictory agenda. An artful rebranding that effectively mutes dissent. This paper traces the evolution of sustainability programs, philosophies and practices in environmental governance, using the quota management system in fisheries as a case in point. Drawing on Medevoi (2010), I propose an alternative, darker, reading of sustainability, one that captures historic understandings of sustain to imply withstanding pain, injury and suffering; a damage which is not so much mitigated as endured; bearing a burden, charge or cost. It is this dark side, I think, which is both obscured and revealed in the zeal with which payment for ecosystem services are being introduced as the way to do sustainable environmental management. Our fisheries, atmosphere, water and soils are asked to tolerate exploitation. At the same time their very ontology enables us to calculate their monetary exchange value in order to service their services, a moral mitigation which ultimately serves to sustain capital accumulation itself.