Neo-liberal or not? Creeping enclosures and openings in the making of fisheries governance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Neo-liberalism can mean different things from different perspectives. Social scientists tend to use the concept to identify and critique trends of privatization, marketization, commodification and enclosures, and their associated slew of exclusionary, dispossessive, and regressive effects. Counterintuitively, governmentality analyses identify how practices of collaboration, inclusion, participation, and empowerment—practices sometimes cited as means to resist and generate alternatives to neo-liberalism—are not only consistent with neo-liberal governing but also central to its functioning. This paper engages a biopolitics and governmentality analytical perspective to examine different kinds of fisheries policies in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL), Canada, where the historic cod collapse created a laboratory for examining social-ecological effects of capitalist overexploitation, resource mismanagement, and knowledge system blind spots. The case is useful because it includes, on the one hand, practices traditionally seen as reinforcing neo-liberal governance, such as property making, resource management access rationalization, and global eco-labels, and, on the other hand, practices where linkages to neo-liberalism require more critical assessment, such as fisher-influenced professionalization policies, license collaboration/consolidation initiatives, and producer-oriented eco-labels. Drawing on a governmentality perspective, this paper examines how governance change in NL fisheries is driven not by a single regulatory logic but, rather, by diverse “technologies of government” and “technologies of agency.” Diverse technologies of agency, with varying degrees of links to neo-liberalism, facilitate “creeping” enclosures and openings for fish harvesters in NL fisheries. The paper finds that multi-faceted social protection and coastal community-oriented rationalities of fisher groups are key explanatory variables in shaping practices for and against neo-liberal governance, suggesting that the relationship of diverse neo-liberal, moral economy and hybrid governmentalities to lived experiences requires more empirical and theoretical attention.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.096 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".