Paper Short Abstract:

This paper addresses struggles between commercial fishing interests and state-led environmental protection measures in the context of coastal development across the U.S. Gulf Coast, and discusses scientific expertise as a form of speculative labor in state-led coastal development strategies.

Paper Abstract:

This paper addresses the tensions and struggles emerging between commercial fishing interests and state-led environmental protection measures in the context of coastal development across the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Since the 1970s, as state-led efforts in developing markets for coastal tourism organized around recreational fishing intensified across the U.S. Gulf coast states, narratives of resource scarcity and questions of environmental protection have animated conflicts between the region’s commercial fisheries, state agencies, and overlapping interests in conservation organizations and the recreational fisheries.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic research among commercial fisherfolk in Louisiana, this paper hones in on central moments of transformation in fishery legislation in the Gulf coast fisheries. In doing so, it posits fishery legislation as an arena in which contestations over livelihood, environmental protection, and coastal economic development strategies intersect. More specifically, the paper discusses the mobilization of scientific expertise as part and parcel of a wider unfolding of coastal transformation, and as a form of speculative labor, which in this context has been integral in legitimizing and facilitating transformations in the coastal landscape and the livelihoods it sustains.