From models to maps: The discourse of fisheries and the potential for community management in New Englan

The commercial fishing industry in New England is in a state of crisis. Given current fishing effort, several species of commercially valuable fish are at population levels well below that needed for a sustainable harvest. This crisis of resource scarcity and depletion due to overuse threatens an industry that supports not only thousands of individual fishers but entire communities and shore-side related industries in New England. The crisis in New England is understood through the discourse of fisheries bioeconomics that combines equilibrium models of population dynamics with the "problem" of common property. Bioeconomics dominates scientific inquiry into New England fisheries and it strongly influences management initiatives. The result is a centralized authoritarian management informed by numeric models of fish populations and insistent upon regulations that simulate privatization of the resource. Alternative forms of management, such as community or co-management, are not considered.;Understanding the discursive barriers to and revealing the potential for community management in New England are the two objectives of this dissertation. The first objective was realized through an analysis of bioeconomic discourse. The evolution of the discourse and its initial assumptions were traced from the late nineteenth century to the present. The analysis revealed consistent concepts of fishers as atomistic individuals and space as a statistical container of fish populations. These concepts are barriers to community management dependent upon fishers as community members and space as community territory.;The second objective, to reveal the potential for community management of fisheries in New England, was realized through two analyses, a class analysis and an analysis of the spatial practices of fishers. Both analyses were based upon interviews with fishers from Gloucester, MA and other primary sources. Fishers were asked questions relevant to class processes and to draw maps indicating their spatial practices. The class analysis detailed a cooperative process where all fishers share in the appropriation and distribution of surplus. This arrangement is consistent with community management of fisheries elsewhere. The "cartographic" analysis revealed a variety of spatial practices by fishers that point to de facto territories also consistent with community management. These findings contradict the assumptions of the bioeconomic approach and they reveal processes (economic and spatial) that are potential foundations for community management of fisheries in New England.