Territorialization, the Mobilization of Bias and the Collapse of the Northern Cod Stocks

From Introduction: "This paper contributes to our understanding of the collapse of the Atlantic Canadian groundfish stocks by linking the dynamics of sovereignty initiatives and shifting property relations associated with a privatization agenda to the spatial organization of science and management, and the dynamics of knowledge production and control. Our analysis focuses on the northern cod stocks and the period between June 1986 and April 1987. We have selected this period because this was the time when the precision and accuracy of DFO estimates of northern cod stock abundance, the largest Atlantic groundfish stock, were first questioned in an organized, public and sustained fashion, and because scientific and state response to this challenge set the stage for a delayed response to indicators of resource degradation in subsequent years. \n \n"This paper builds on Finlayson's (1994) social constructionist analysis of the northern cod collapse as a product of bureaucratically-embedded science and tensions between bureaucratic and scientific rationality, and is informed by evidence of political intervention in DFO groundfish science (Anderson and Steele, 1992; 1997; Hutchings, Haedrich and Walters, 1997). We open with a discussion of the ways processes related to sovereignty claims and developing property relations in the period between 1977 and 1986 interacted with knowledge production and management to create both strong pressures for an expanding Canadian northern cod fishery and a context of scientific uncertainty. This background discussion sets the stage for a microanalysis of the dynamics of the first organized challenge to both this expansionism and to the scientific advice on which it was based. We look at the development of this challenge and at scientific, management and political response to it. Like others, we link the marginalization of the challenge to the culture of DFO science (Finlayson, 1994), but also to the spatial construction of fisheries science and management and to a developing privatization policy agenda. Finally, we suggest that this privatization agenda and the conditions under which it was pursued may have augmented the scientific and bureaucratic barriers to public discussions concerning problems with DFO's science and management for northern cod after 1987.... \n \n"In our analysis of events associated with the onset of the northern cod crisis, we begin with the way various dimensions of territorialization shaped the context for and the form of the initial challenge to northern cod stock assessment science in 1986. The link between this context and our microanalysis of events in 1986-87 is through power relations which acted to 'mobilize bias' against this challenge and its authors. 'Mobilization of bias' is a dimension in the exercise of power within institutions. It refers to institutional features and knowledge frameworks that tend to admit some issues and agents while excluding others. Within science, it entails the processes by which some alternatives may remain invisible because of the ways data are collected and understood (the spatial aspect of territorialization) and because proponents lack the resources to affect decision making processes or because they are excluded from these processes (property relations and decision-making structures within the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and the industry)(Bachrach and Baratz, 1970; Schrecker, 1984)."

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