Paper short abstract:

Demographic and ecological crises are challenging the viability of Japanese coastal fisheries, still famous for cooperative resource management. This paper analyzes how fishery reform and global discourses of sustainable growth are driving the enclosure of one of the last natural resource commons.

Paper long abstract:

In view of pressing concerns about overfishing, the degradation of marine environments, and climate change, the concept of sustainability is omnipresent in discussions of fishery reforms, but it remains highly contested. This paper analyzes how global discourses of sustainable growth and institutional reform in the Japanese fishing sector are driving the enclosure of one of the last vestiges of natural resource commons. An analysis of programmatic publications and promotion activities for "sustainable" ocean economies is complemented with findings from qualitative interviews and field research in small fishing communities in Kyushu. How are concepts of common resources, property, food security, and sustainability being renegotiated, and what are the implications of economic growth strategies in the face of ecological and demographic crisis?

Coastal fishing communities in Japan were often idealized as the last resorts of communal re-source administration in an industrialized country, since coastal fishing rights were largely controlled and administered collectively in territorial fishery cooperatives in a form of "sea tenure". However, demographic change is weakening the commons functions in aging communities, and declining profitability and resource stocks, shrinking numbers of fishers, and a lack of successors are challenging the future of small, close-knit cooperatives. Reform of the Japanese Fishery Law aiming for new growth in the sector now envisions the opening up of coastal fishery resources to corporate investors and the introduction of fishing quotas.

Harking back to dated theories of a supposed "tragedy of the commons" (Hardin/Gordon), this focus on private property regimes, market mechanisms, and presuppositions of economic and scientific rationality drives the commodification, financialization, and enclosure of this heterotopic commons - a process supported through well-funded agenda setting campaigns by charitable foundations, environmental trust funds, and NGOs, mostly from North America. Recent international "blue economy" programs also treat the oceans as one of the last natural frontiers for resource exploitation and are criticized as "ocean grabbing" in parallel to preceding global processes on agricultural lands. How are these discourses affecting the declining commons in Japanese coastal fisheries?