United States fisheries scientists and policymakers are currently debating a variety of marine spatial planning and other resource allocation measures designed to better manage the nation's fisheries. At a smaller-scale, regional level individual fishermen are engaged in debates between ocean resources and political opinions. These debates have tangible consequences for fishers and for the wider public. In the Carteret County area of North Carolina a lengthy commercial fishing history has witnessed a steep decline, matched by a simultaneous rise in recreational fishing activity. This has created socioeconomic tensions and political disagreements between the two groups, who often target the same fishing areas. Concern about fishery resources and policies arises not only from commercial fishers anxious about their livelihoods but also from consumers concerned about the environmental sustainability of imported seafood. This confluence of issues has led to the creation of several community-supported fisheries (CSFs) in the Northeast and most recently one in North Carolina.
Doctoral student Noelle Boucquey at Duke University, under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Campbell will examine the decline of the fisheries in Carteret County in North Carolina. In this case study the historic changes in fishing patterns and debates will be documented, contemporary fishing narratives and commercial-recreational user group conflicts will be examined, and the symbolic and practical functions of a community-supported fishery program will be probed. This study will collect archived text and imagery data for the historical analysis and will collect ethnographic, in-depth interviews, maps, and photographic data for the contemporary components of the project. Project results are expected to help identify underlying sources of conflict among different fishers, and will provide strategies for better management of fishery resources and their users.
The results of the project will help model the relationships between fishers of different types and will help answer questions about how different groups negotiate access to marine common-pool resources. The project will also provide a timely analysis of a relatively new phenomenon in fisheries, the community-supported fishery (CSF), which will allow for fruitful comparisons to be made with analogous community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs. The project's evaluation of the successes and failures of the CSF model will also offer practical insights into a particular fish harvesting and marketing regime. In current State legislative debates about specific marine species, there are real implications for how resources are to be allocated amongst different groups. Assuring the most equitable division of such resources requires the type of thorough ethnographic, historically-situated information this project will provide. This project will provide a basis for the types of fishery regulations that might be successful for managing fisheries at regional and national scales.
Introduction Using a case study of Carteret County, North Carolina, this doctoral dissertation research explored historic and contemporary narratives about fishery resource-use issues (e.g., conflicts over ocean spaces and species, disputes over fisheries governance, competing claims about the value of fish and fishing) in order to contribute to theoretical and practical policy questions about resource allocation and management. Though shifting slightly between the proposal and implementation phases of the project, the final project objectives were: (1) To analyze how historic narratives about fish and fishing have changed over the past century; (2) To evaluate the resource-use narratives of contemporary commercial and recreational fishers; and (3) To examine the process of state fisheries policymaking. Results In terms of objective (1), the project found that newspaper stories about fishery resources have varied through time and with respect to the type of fishing discussed. These findings showed increasing frictions between commercial and recreational fishers over time, precipitated by state regulatory and research decisions and increasingly divergent interpretations by fishers of the proper roles for fish in environmental, economic, and social systems. In terms of objective (2), the project found that commercial and recreational fishers had distinct ways of thinking about fishery resources, shaped by their personal fishing histories as well as larger socioeconomic trends. In particular, though both types of fishers would agree that ‘fish are valuable public resources that should not be wasted,’ their definitions of value, public, and waste were very different. Recreational fishers argued that fish were valuable because they brought in recreational tourism money to the region. Commercial fishers pointed to the value of fish in supporting individual families and larger communities with livelihoods and food. In terms of objective (3), the project found that both recreational and commercial narratives are expressed within the policy process and that most policymaker decisions are compromises between commercial and recreational arguments. Political alliances frequently shift, but Division of Marine Fisheries staff (and their reports) often display substantial power to influence decision-making. Stock assessments serve as issues around which moral arguments are made about how fisheries should be managed and allocated. Further, the structure of communication between the public and the Marine Fisheries Commission often works to demarcate a limited role for public participation. Intellectual Merit and Broader Impacts In terms of intellectual merit, this project contributed to nature-society research in the fields of political ecology, cultural and economic geography, and environmental history. In theorizing nature-society relationships, one key theme highlighted in this project's findings is that of valuing nature, and the idea that doing so also means valuing particular types of interactions between human and nonhuman nature (in this case fish). Further, by examining expressions of cultural politics through time, this research has shown how different modes of interacting with fishery resources over decades has worked to separate recreational and commercial fishers socially and politically (leading to clashes where they overlap spatially). Where these cultural politics matter most is in struggles over the purpose of different types of fish and the meaning of central concepts in fisheries management, as the outcomes have implications for both the practical use of resources and the character and scale of governing institutions. In terms of broader impacts, while conducting the project 13 undergraduate and graduate students were trained in different aspects of social science research; including interviewing, transcribing, archival research, and project organization. Further, this project explored specific resource-use issues in part to contribute to practical policy questions about resource allocation and management. The project has shown how different points of view are constructed and how they operate within a policy arena. In potential engagements with new marine planning projects, the complexity of local issues suggests that taking the time to research stakeholders’ underlying value systems could provide a better basis for policy negotiations.
