Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places and Power

Economic logic that guides the limitation and privatization of access rights seeks to address overcapitalization and inefficiencies that result from open access fisheries. This type of fisheries management, often called rationalization, has gained international common sense appeal. Yet the contested social impacts of restricted access, market-based resource management programs are increasingly documented in academic literature and continue to be a focus of social resistance and mobilization among those who have been displaced, or rationalized out of fishing in this process. The outcomes of ownership consolidation, loss of jobs and income, decreased labor mobility, prohibitive entry costs, loss of fishing rights from small communities and other distributional inequities can be understood broadly as the sociocultural effects of fisheries access restrictions this volume addresses.