Research

”How objects become manageable – The cyborg fish and the management of cod in Canada, Norway and the European Union.”
Although natural resources have been exploited since the beginning of humanity, modern resource management is a recent phenomenon. The huge variety in type of resources, adaptations, knowledge systems, institutions, and practices in natural resources exploitation have made it difficult to get the harvest of common property or free-for-all-resources under political and managerial control. The fish as well as the fishers were for all practical purposes unmanageable. From the late 1960s, when it became apparent that important fisheries resources were about to be overexploited, the process to transform fish, people and technologies so as to make them manageable was intensified. The outcome of this process, of which the cyborg fish is a metaphor, is a complex and heterogeneous network linking together nature, society, technology, science, markets, and policy in new ways. The robo fishers, killing machines, cyborg fish and other creatures are calculated by different methods, metered out in a variety of units, and used for the regulation of a wide range of processes and at different stages of such processes. These cyborgs link together a wide range of practices, be they scientific, political, cultural, or technological. They are constituted by and constitute resource management, the Fishing Leviathan.

Funding: Norwegian Research Council. partners: Centre for Rural Research, Norwegian College of Fisheries Science, Norwegian Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Other contact persons:
Petter Holm
Stein Arne Rånes
Peter S. Sinclair

Teaching

Autumn 2006: SVF-3553/3505 International fisheries and Aquaculture Management (Fiskeriforvaltning)

This course builds on the introductory course in fisheries development. We start by focusing on the institutional setting, i.e. the LOS convention establishing the 200 miles EEZs as well as more traditional management systems for inshore and inland fisheries. The second part deals with the different management measures, with a view to biological and economic effects as well as distributional and social concerns. The third section explains the role of monitoring, control and surveillance and deals explicitly with the problem of legitimacy, in terms of process as well as results (quotas of actual catches). Fourthly, we treat the role of science in fisheries management, not only the biological disciplines, but also the social sciences, including economics as well. We also look at user group participation, all within the context of management institutions. The fifth and the final part deals with the planning of fisheries development, discussing the project cycle and other common planning tools like logical frame work analysis (LFA) etc. This part also includes a discussion of planning vs. the use of market solutions, intending to show the merits of each as well as the preconditions for the successful implementation of a fisheries plan.