Paper short abstract:

This paper makes visible the links between how governance regimes and conceptualisations of fish travelled via the complex machinations of European imperialism and worldviews, and the imposition of these regimes onto marine relationships.

Paper long abstract:

Focusing on the Marine and Coastal Area (Takutai Moana) Act 2011 and the Māori commercial aquaculture Act 2004, I interrogate the contested development of marine governance in Aotearoa/New Zealand. These legal recognitions evolved as concessions to Indigenous challenges regarding the growth of marine farming in seascapes of special significance to Māori, though are directed towards different ends: the settlement of Māori claims to commercial aquaculture incorporates Māori into the national aquaculture business development framework, whereas the Marine and Coastal Area Act concerns the protection of ancestral cultural practices and marine title in the foreshore and seabed area. Underpinning both, however, is a dichotomisation of Indigenous marine relations into cultural and economic spheres, conservationist and blue growth framings; bordering dynamics which work to both hierarchise cross-cutting flows of kin relatedness in Māori social organisation and institutionalise new forms of marine territorialisation. Drawing on ethnographic research with coastal Māori tribes, I suggest that an Indigenous ability to border cross categories of social difference references the radical potential of kinship to challenge the generation of marine inequality in the context of environmental demise.