New data technologies and the politics of scale in environmental management (forthcoming in The Annals of the American Association of Geographers)

Knowledge and scientific practice have largely been backdrops to examinations of scale and rescaling processes, including in studies of rescaling environmental management. The growing use of new data technologies in environmental management highlights the need to situate knowledge and scientific practice into the politics and production of scale. Reviewing sixty years of debate over spatial management of the highly migratory and Atlantic bluefin tuna, this piece illustrates the central, dynamic roles of knowledge and scientific practice in scalar transboundary management. Findings corroborate prior studies demonstrating that stakeholders mobilize knowledge (and uncertainty) to influence spatialized management. We examine if such practices are transformed by new data technologies, a nomenclature we adopt as “more” than big data to encapsulate and parse methods of data collection or generation, the data themselves, and the analytical techniques and infrastructures developed to “make sense” of data for management purposes. We find that as new data technologies reveal objects in space and time, they reformulate and multiply – rather than resolve and circumscribe – scalar management possibilities. They mix with historic scientific and political practices and are never “complete.” Beyond the bluefin case, findings point to the complications of turning to new data technologies – often uncritically celebrated for their potential to give clear, actionable data – to “solve” scalar dilemmas. Instead, they are positioned to become a new way of knowing the world: a new geo-epistemology that shapes experimentation and debate around the spatialized power relations determining control over contested spaces and the valuable resources within and moving through them

Resources are vexing!

Resource use and management are central concerns to environmental geography scholars, who have mobilized diverse approaches to examine the making, circulation, and socioecological effects of resources and resource systems. Informed by our reading of the resource geography literature and our experiences editing The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography, we reflect on the role of resources in the study of human–environment interactions. First, we outline what we mean by “critical” in critical resource geography and identify approaches scholars working in this area have taken to understand resources and the worlds that are created and undone through their production, circulation, consumption, and disposal. We then identify an aporia internal to critical resource geography that derives from the field's centering of a concept—“resources”—that is fundamentally linked to the colonial and capitalist subjugation of peoples and environments. Building from this, we propose an orientation for the field that recognizes critique to be the starting point of a collective effort to “unbound” the World of Resources with the aim of making what are now familiar resource-relations unacceptable

Frontiers. Privatize, Democratize, Decolonize: Ocean Epistemologies in the 21st Century

Knowledge, as well as knowledge gaps about the oceans, shape the ways that humans govern these spaces, which are often beyond direct human observation. Like other frontiers in Western historiography, the ocean is susceptible to imperialism, anthropocentrism, and resource-driven global capitalism. However, it is also a site of possible alternatives to these dominant approaches because it is relatively ‘undergoverned’ in comparison with land, and its material features can present challenges to enclosure and commodification. What then, is the role that knowledge plays in influencing ongoing tensions among extraction, conservation and intergenerational justice in the oceans? We offer three epistemological lenses that each focus, disperse and enrich understanding of the knowledges pertaining to ocean spaces and governance. First, we examine the role of proprietary data in shaping contemporary resource extraction and accompanying regulatory and conservation debates in the deep seabed. Second, we consider emerging new data technologies and accompanying visualization techniques that aim to democratize oceans governance by making knowledge about oceans and processes on and in them widely available. Finally, we consider decolonized, anti-anthropocentric knowledges about ocean spaces, ‘nations’ and accompanying relationships and responsibilities. In doing so, we identify a disparate array of knowledges -- that we conceptualize as an epistemological frontier -- as central to the future of oceans presently beyond full incorporation into capitalist circuits, but increasingly within their sights

Critical Resource Geography: An Introduction

The Routledge Handbook of Critical Resource Geography offers a toolkit of critical, reflexive, and speculative approaches for studying resources and the socioecological systems with which they are co-constitutively entangled. This chapter introduces two fundamental ideas about critical resource geography that emerge from the Handbook’s contents: first, that the critical analysis of resource systems and their historical and contemporary geographies is integral for understanding the state of the world; second, that doing critical resource geography involves ongoing reflection on how, why, and for whom academic knowledge production about resources matters. To advance these propositions, this chapter situates the descriptor “critical” in critical resource geography and outlines key trajectories of intellectual-political analysis within this body of scholarship, organized around two thematic areas: “(Un)knowing the World of Resources” and “Unbounding the World of Resources.” Together, these sections outline a heuristic device, “resource-making/world-making,” that builds from and further develops relational forms of thinking central to resource geography. Then, the chapter provides an overview of the objectives and contents of the Handbook’s four main sections. Finally, the concluding section elaborates on the motivations that prompted this volume and invites readers to engage with the world of critical resource geography and the possibilities it presents

Preface: Handbook-Making

Handbooks are products of the careful curation of a diverse collection of contributions, but we rarely hear about how these collections come together — that is, about the processes of selecting, organizing, and looking after the items that end up in a collection. This Preface represents our effort to raise the curtain on our editorial process and the conditions under which the Handbook was created, which we see as part of our commitment to ongoing reflection on the question of how, why, and for whom the academic production of knowledge about resources matters (see Valdivia, Himley, and Havice, Chapter 1 this volume). It offers an overview of the intellectual-political method that unfolded incrementally and collaboratively during the production of the Handbook

Industrial Fisheries and Ocean Accumulation

Three-fourths of the world’s marine capture fisheries are at or beyond ‘full exploitation’, indicating the likelihood that many fish populations, and the ecosystem of which they are a part, will decline (if they are not already) with current and expanded levels of competitive extraction, though the geographies of fisheries decline and recovery are uneven. Fish, whether saltwater or freshwater, farmed or captured, are an important source of animal protein, micronutrients and fatty acids crucial to alleviating malnutrition, hundreds of millions of people are employed as fish workers and in fisheries-related activities, and fish exports from developing countries generate a higher export value than coffee, bananas, cocoa, tea, sugar and tobacco combined (Campling et al. 2012). State and market pressures from outside fishing industries also shape the ecological resources that fisheries depend upon. For example, the ‘deadly trio’ of oceanic warming, acidification and deoxygenation – all driven by terrestrial capitalism – threatens in particular larger-bodied animals living at the top of trophic levels in the oceans’ ecosystems (Payne et al. 2016). These changes and declines are a likely oceanic outcome of ‘business as usual’ for global capitalism. Mainstream social science fisheries research has largely been under-attentive to fisheries systems in general and particularly in relation to questions of how they are shaped through capitalism. Historically, the prevailing treatment of fisheries in the social sciences has been biologically and economically reductionist, and policy thinking is ‘subsumed under the goals of economic growth and wealth creation’ (Symes and Phillipson 2009, 1). Fisheries have been treated as ‘a technicality, an exercise of narrow, instrumental rationality ruled by universal theory’ (Jentoft 2007, 435), and ‘the individual producer [is theorized] as an autonomous isolate engaged in the technical act of catching fish’ (Pálsson 1991, 21). However, over the last ten years, this has begun to change rapidly (for a recent review, see Bavnick et al. 2018). With Penny McCall Howard, in 2012 we edited a special double issue of Journal of Agrarian Change that sought to examine the political economy and ecology of capture fisheries, drawing explicitly from the analytical tools available to critical agrarian studies, and enriching these tools with cases from the water. In our introduction to that special issue (Campling et al. 2012), we charted three themes that we saw then as pertinent to critical agrarian studies and the political economy of capture fisheries: market dynamics and competition in fisheries production-consumption systems; labour, forms of exploitation and resistance; and resource access and the state. In the years since, there has been a flourishing of attention to fisheries specifically, and of extractive relations in aquatic spaces more broadly. Here we advance two main objectives: 1) to introduce study of industrial fisheries to a critical agrarian studies audience and indicate relevant intersections between the two, and 2) to highlight new advances, emergent research themes and exciting scholars working in the field of ‘oceanic accumulation’ (Sibilia 2019). Given space limitations, we focus on industrial marine capture fisheries and to raise questions about ocean accumulation more generally. We recognise the profound socio-economic and ecological importance of artisanal and small-scale coastal fisheries, and inland or riverine fisheries, as well as booming aquaculture and mariculture industries. These are essential areas for critical agrarian studies and each presents important analytical similarities and differences and we encourage scholars working in the critical agrarian studies tradition to research these and their articulations; our hope is that the discussion here offers foundations for ongoing and expanding attention to critical agrarian studies beyond the terrestrial

Will a catch share for whales improve social welfare?

We critique a proposal to use catch shares to manage transboundary wildlife resources with potentially high non-extractive values, and we focus on the case of whales. Because whales are impure public goods, a policy that fails to capture all nonmarket benefits (due to free riding) could lead to a suboptimal outcome. Even if free riding were overcome, whale shares would face four implementation challenges. First, a whale share could legitimize the international trade in whale meat and expand the whale meat market. Second, a legal whale trade creates monitoring and enforcement challenges similar to those of organizations that manage highly migratory species such as tuna. Third, a whale share could create a new political economy of management that changes incentives and increases costs for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to achieve the current level of conservation. Fourth, a whale share program creates new logistical challenges for quota definition and allocation regardless of whether the market for whale products expands or contracts. Each of these issues, if left unaddressed, could result in lower overall welfare for society than under the status quo

The role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto

Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and thereby seek to establish the study of law and GVCs as rich and important terrain for research in its own righ

The role of law in global value chains: a research manifesto

Most scholars attribute the development and ubiquity of global value chains to economic forces, treating law as an exogenous factor, if at all. By contrast, we assert the centrality of legal regimes and private ordering mechanisms to the creation, structure, geography, distributive effects and governance of Global Value Chains (GVCs), and thereby seek to establish the study of law and GVCs as rich and important terrain for research in its own righ