Paper short abstract:

The Baltic Sea is currently in a state of ecological crisis due to overfishing, climate change, and pollution. Focusing on the coast of Poland, this paper examines knowledge production, contestation, and governance among coastal fishers, marine scientists, and policymakers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses knowledge production, contestation, and governance.

Focusing on the Baltic coast of Poland, I consider tensions among coastal fishers, marine scientists, and national and European Union policymakers. Other studies stress the great range of views among different groups of fishers, including those engaged in large scale industrial fishing, small and mid-scale, and recreational fishing (Boucquey 2020).

The Baltic Sea is currently in a state of ecological crisis due to overfishing, climate change, and pollution. Key fish stocks are on the verge of collapse, prompting international NGOs to call for closures of cod and herring fisheries. Small scale fishers from the Baltic have accused the European Commission of gross mismanagement by allowing large trawlers to continue to fish herring and sprat—the main sources of food for Baltic cod. Some Polish fishermen describe starving cod as “floating bones with skin” (“Rybacy arlarmują” 2018). In October 2020 the European Council closed the cod fishery in the eastern Baltic Sea, but permitted moderate increases in the western Baltic. These situation and negotiations are complex (“Baltic Sea fishing,” 2020). For example, although cod eat adult herring, herring eat the spawn of cod, complicating efforts to direct and implement policy that achieves the necessary balance to improve the situation. The dire state of the Baltic Sea and dwindling opportunities for those seeking to make a living from its fish stocks exacerbate tensions among groups and increase the stakes regarding knowledge production, dialogue, and legitimacy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper departs from Amerindian epistemologies and develops a perspectival ethnography of industrial North-Western European skilled modes of engaging wild fish.

Paper long abstract:

It explores Amerindian perspectivism as an ethnographic methodology grounded on animic premises: subject or object status are relative and relational, experience is intersubjective; the body is permeable, and its perspectives can be exchanged through tools and mimetic processes. Thus subjectivity is collectively constituted and the fundamental means of knowing, leading to acknowledge subjectivity in others. Documenting a perspectival exchange guided by Shetland fishers trawling for monkfish, the paper focuses on some possible dynamics and affective affordances involved in gutting processes. Gutting is a physically and emotionally taxing labour that involves brief but intimate encounters with responsive beings that may offer effective resistance, affecting fishers or damaging their own value as catch. It entails the possibility of developing an intimate knowledge of fish anatomy, ecology, and behaviour, as well as potentially awareness of fish suffering and fishiness, an empathic quality. The research reveals how Shetland fishers maintain animic modes of learning and being, of understandings of the body and fish. The ethnography presents first-hand insights into ‘relations of trust’, which, albeit widely reported, continue to be dismissed as implausible. These relations and their dynamics are further attested through Shetlands háfwords and other language practices that establish synecdochical relations between fishers and fish, restricting violence and making it endurable. These insights problematise violence, illustrating the social skills of fishing and the political dynamics of predation, suggesting paths towards addressing cruelty.

Paper short abstract:

I analyse the materials I gathered during extended fieldwork aboard tall ships, which are old traditional rigged ships. I focus in particular on ‘taskship’ on board. Taskship is both a place and a bundle of correspondences in which boat, environment and crew become entangled.

Paper long abstract:

Taskship is the dialogue between lines of task and the non-human participation of the environment. The only form continually performed at sea is the setting of sails or the shaping of the boat at each moment. To navigate efficiently crew members need to become one with the ship, the sea and the wind (Papadopoulou 2019: 5). The ship acts as a place in which relationships are continuously in movement, thus shaping the boat and its crew members.

They learn through skilled practices and correspondences when tensions between humans and non-humans try to find the best set of sails. Such correspondences include the shared rhythms of the boat with the sea and the adjustments the crew members make to generate the precise tension in the lines for the boat to keep sailing.

Initially, crew members experience arrhythmia—loss of body control—when the extended movement of the boat in their bodies results in vomiting and seasickness. The ship acts as a transductor of the dialogue between the oceanic environment and crew members. By experiencing this dialogue, crew member’s responsiveness to this oceanic environment is at its peak entailing a moral commitment with all on board to set the best form of the sails at any moment. Skilled adjustments contain a beautiful path toward differentiation, a creative process of learning by finding a particular response to every adjustment. In this way, a feeling of mutual attention and memory—that is to say, harmony—can be reached by learning maritime skills aboard tall ships.

Paper short abstract:

MPAs in developing countries have difficulties taking into account the social dimension and adapt to the local context. A related example is the case of Joal Fadiouth MPA where formal governance failed to consider cultural and traditional uses, as well as involving broader stakeholder diversity.

Paper long abstract:

This study analyzes governance challenges of the Joal Fadiouth Marine Protected Area (MPA) in Senegal to identify constraints for ensuring biodiversity conservation while contributing socio-economic benefits for coastal populations. We provide a mixed-method empirical analysis that combines participatory mapping, focus groups interviews, and individual semi-structured interviews from almost 200 individuals in various stakeholder groups. Findings indicate two divergent governance realities: (1) a formal co-management institution governing a defined space with specific rules including direct and indirect stakeholder participation, and (2) traditional uses and governance norms, where cultural practices contribute to the protection of spawning areas. Importantly, findings indicate that traditional authorities, as well as migrants, are not represented in the decision-making body, which undermines its legitimacy with local populations. We conclude the formal governance largely failed to consider the broad spectrum of existing cultural and traditional uses, as well as to include a broader stakeholder diversity who use and influence the resources such as religious circles and women. As a result, the formal zoning and rules do not match local needs, creating perceptions of illegitimacy among local residents, leading to adaptive strategies for income gains such as corruption and lack of co-management investment as a means of discontent.