1 Precarity

Generally, precarity has been conceptualised in three different ways: as a post-Fordist degradation of labour conditions and norms, as a levelling phenomenon that gives rise to new forms and relations of resistance or ontologically, as an inherent human condition. The first interpretation is particularly associated with Euro-American experiences of decline, anxiety, uncertainty and an increasing socio-economic disparity that is perceived to mark the current era as exceptional, a temporal neoliberal crisis or blip. Herein precarity is expressed in labour market insecurity, risk and vulnerability⁶ and “the precariat” emerges as a category to displace an older class of the lumpenproletariat;⁷ the exploitation of “precariat” labour, however, is considered to be enabled by an internalised ideology of individual responsibility, creativity and/or passion. Precarity references the loss of a steady and stable income, a decline in unionisation, diminishing social welfare provisions and, simultaneously, the normalisation of temporary, zero hours contracts and informal work, whether for middle class workers in the gig economy, eternally adjunct professors in academia, migrant fruit pickers or those in creative industries.⁸ In this synopsis, the Keynesian era expansion of wage labour contracts and welfare policies has been systematically hollowed out over the last four decades to be replaced by structural adjustment and austerity packages pushed by international organizations such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, as well as the European Union and nation states.⁹ This is coupled with “investment away from historic industrial centers to newly industrialised zones, financialisation, real estate speculation and rapid urbanization, together producing a new geography of capitalism.”¹⁰

Critiques of this interpretation of precarity point out that Fordism was exceptional, more contingent and shorter than imagined, whereas precarity is capitalism’s norm.¹¹ Further, that our nostalgia for an era of stability is historically misplaced, referring more correctly to a brief post-Fordist convergence of centralised union bargaining with Keynesian welfarism.¹² In Henry Ford’s automobile factories, “armed security guards, shop floor spies, physical intimidation and external propaganda were all part of the method employed … to cut workers’ contact with their peers and bind their labour to a pre-ordained tempo set by the factory’s machinery.” Weston, adding to this picture of dystopia, writes that the Ford Motor company affectively reinvented the masses, introducing industrial produced compounds into domestic life, encouraging both industry and citizen-consumer pollution.¹³ And, significantly for my argument here, Fordist economies were shaped by the violence of colonialism and settler colonialism as well as the normalising of precarious conditions for people in the global South.¹⁴ Hence, both Fordism’s heyday and decline are misremembered.

Alternatively, precarity may seed the emergence of a socio-political identity, a potentially disruptive agent linked to a new and vibrant form of labour activism.¹⁵ Precarity conceived as a leveller, or a political economy of the commons, arose foremost out of activist practices that erupted across public spaces in Europe in the mid-2000s. Becoming a rallying cry for those seeking an alternative to capitalism,¹⁶ precarity emerged as a condensation symbol in EuroMayDay protests, Precarity Ping Pong in the UK, the International meeting of the Precariat in Berlin and the activist-linking precarity map. The absence of similar movements in New Zealand and Australia during this era is striking. While small pockets of activists in New Zealand have used the language of precarity in more recent protests¹⁷ and it has entered academic work,¹⁸ it has not emerged as a horizontal inducing focus for struggle, nor gained traction as a means of organising radical political activity. Neilson and Rossiter, comparing the vocality of precarity protests in Italy with their lack in Australia, suggest that more is at stake than language, expressive differences, or the limited uptake of travelling theories. Instead, “the brief emergence of precarity as a platform for political movements in Western Europe has to do with the relative longevity, in this context, of social state models in the face of neoliberal labour reforms.”¹⁹ That is, where the social state has maintained less presence, precarity does not emerge as an exceptional condition sparking civil unrest. In New Zealand, the neoliberal reorganization of society from the 1980s is remarkable for the depth and speed of reforms, in particular a shift of social responsibilities from the public sphere (government) to the private sphere (individuals, families, and households).²⁰ By the mid-2000s, New Zealand had experienced insecure labour market conditions for two decades.

In Europe, precarity as collective resistance did not last, its demise variously theorised as a result of imagining the state as an institution fit to combat the growth of insecure labour,²¹ or, as Tsianos and Papadopoulos suggest, precarious subjectivities do not somehow make up a unified social actor.²² The latter point is also made by Neilson and Rossiter, who, while arguing that precarity is embedded in capitalist production, acknowledge that it does not seamlessly knit together “experiences of contingency, vulnerability and risk across different historical periods and geographical spaces.”²³ Yet, this does not pre-empt the possibility that precarious labourers may at times achieve work based solidarity²⁴ and that ongoing experiences of precarity may unite indigeneity, locally and transnationally.²⁵ The rendering of nature as precarious may also organise opposition to desecrating the sacred, coalescing differently placed actors against seabed mining in Aotearoa,²⁶ military testing in Micronesia,²⁷ deep sea mining in Papua New Guinea²⁸ and the construction of monster telescopes on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea.²⁹ It is the ability of precarity to capture both a condition and the potential for mobilisation in response to that condition, that marks it as analytically distinct from terms such as poverty, risk and vulnerability.

As a generalised human condition, “precariousness” is conceptualised as enduring beyond specific events imposed by macro structures.³⁰ This gives rise to certain existential challenges and states of common, though differentially distributed, vulnerability: we are both empowered by and dependent on other people; our body relies on others for survival, but this exposes us to destruction and death.³¹ Precarity is thus part of every exchange by virtue of the fact that we are dependent on the grace or will of others.³² It also expresses, in the contemporary post 9/11 United States and elsewhere, the insecurity, fear, fragility and powerlessness of human lives in the context of everyday oppressive governmentality.³³ For Tsing, precarity, defined as “life without the possibility of stability,” is universalised, with the “we” who experience this precarity inclusive of endangered species and sinking Pacific islands.³⁴ Yet Tsing also embraces this instability as a fluid state of reality. Hence “an earthwide condition of precarity” provides opportunity for new possibilities of multispecies coexistence shaping a “third nature,” comprised of what manages to live despite capitalism.

Anthropological ideas about alternative, hybrid or human economies, initiated as a response to the 2008 Global Fiscal Crisis, also suggest the existence of phenomena providing possibilities within, around or despite capitalism.³⁵ In drawing empirical attention to the existence of a plurality of economic forms in any society as against a singular notion of the economy as “capitalist,” this scholarship suggests that attention should be paid to what people are already doing, to alternative economic practices and the combination of different practices and to give these more emphasis in forging a new direction in economic change. Tsing’s notion of a third nature somewhat shadows these economic possibilities, though her emphasis is on the unexpected social relations, extending also to non-humans, that emerge within capitalism. Māori relations with non-human others, such as the fish identified in the interview excerpt beginning this paper or the shape-shifting kaitiaki discussed below, could be considered in this vein. My interest lies in exploring how these relationships are constrained or otherwise expressed through market environmentalism to produce conditions of precarity in Māori fisheries.

2 On Precarity and Indigeneity

While a number of authors have critiqued the spatio-temporal conceit of precarity as primarily expressive of recent Euro-American experiences of decline, little actual scholarship addresses precarity in indigenous societies (though Hinkson’s work on Indigenous Australian placemaking and Lusby’s on urban labour migrations in Papua New Guinea provide notable exceptions),³⁶ the problem to which I now turn. Adding to the above discussion, three specific concerns are pivotal in understanding precarity and indigeneity in general, and in Māori fisheries in particular. First, ownership and dispossession, the tense interplay between which features critically in indigenous claims against colonial alienations, though importantly, dispossession is “a condition that is not simply countered by appropriation.”³⁷ Second, environmental precarity and the articulation of this with indigenous natures. Third, while precarious labour is associated with neoliberalisation, for indigenous peoples its reach is much deeper, being rooted in the violence of colonial political economies and the imposition of unequal labour regimes, which racialise working groups. That is, legislation and institutional discrimination grounded in the story of the “lazy native” who must be stripped of her unproductive land, language, kinship and ritual obligations in order to participate in capitalism’s modernising crusade, and the simultaneous cries of inauthenticity when she does. This history is crucial when considering the impact of neoliberalisation on already precarious lives. These three tropes intersect to produce “a political ecology of the precarious” in Māori fisheries.

3 Environmental Precarity

The current impacts of environmental crises, such as climate change, rising oceans, marine pollution, sea life migrations, depletions and extinctions are drastic consequences of broader conditions of global precarity.⁵⁰ Non-human actors are critically tied up in these circumstances. They are entangled, for instance, in the ideology of neoliberal capitalism which works to separate humans from nature enabling the construction of the sea as property, fish species as stock with economic potential, or biovalue, and catch rights as financialised instruments in future trading markets. Precarity arises too in the conjunction of the need to push beyond limits with the need to reimpose these as scarcity.⁵¹ In this context, “sustainability” emerges as a persuasive morality, disguising both transcendence and limitedness. Environmental precarity thus becomes sustainable economic opportunity in a multitude of ways, from eco-friendly motor vehicles to, in the oceans, aquaculture, Marine Stewardship Council certification, precision seafood harvesting, privatised catch rights and the advancing technology of deep sea vessels, designed to fish all species with reduced labour requirements; developments captured in Weston’s concept of “a political ecology of the precarious.” In appropriated Māori fisheries such contradictions are manifest in quota trading activities, the separation of customary and commercial spheres and in the translation of quota as a Treaty of Waitangi right.

4 Conclusion

Precarity describes experiences of instability in working lives, the tenuous nature of social exchanges in the context of authoritarian governance and securitisation, at the same time as it is observed to globalize.⁷² Precarity thus becomes inclusive of neoliberalised labourers in the global South, worldwide experiences of disenfranchisement and placelessness, as well as environmental demise. As a concept, however, precarity loses its analytical edge if the historical specificities of ethnographic contexts are subsumed to a mantra suggesting “we are all precarious now.” I have argued that, for indigenous people in colonial settler states, the dyadic of possession/dispossession, the articulation of indigenous natures with neoliberal environmental management technologies and the longevity of precariat labour, combined with its racist origins, are distinctive features of precarity.

itq systems dichotomise nature and culture, facilitate capital accumulation and generate class inequality, and this occurs irrespective of the decision of Māori leaders to act in capitalist or non-capitalist ways. As a political ecology of the precarious they ostensibly sustain socio-natures through privatising catch rights, rewarding the property holders whilst devaluing fishermen’s work and knowledge. They underwrite commercial exploitation levels through modelling the maximum reproductive rates of fish species, configured at the level of single stock in a bounded ecosystem. Herein, economic growth is an assumed prerequisite for positive social and environmental outcomes.⁷³ Sealord’s new Norwegian built vessel, Tokatu (the rock that stands in the ocean), a “state of the art” factory trawler, illustrates this trajectory. The largest and most modern vessel in the New Zealand fleet, it is equipped with technology designed to enhance “sustainability” while hunting all available deep sea quota — energy production equipment allowing electricity to drive the vessel at times, other fuel saving mechanisms, precision seafood harvesting technology and infrastructure to process at sea. Its products, designed for global markets, are produced with lower labour requirements and more comfort for those onboard. The launch of Tokatu, featuring waiata and the affecting Pokarekare Ana, made “the hairs on the back of my neck start to come up as the boat was coming out of the shed” (ceo of an iwi fishing company).⁷⁴ It is both an overt display of the strength of the Māori fishing economy and the absence of Māori fishers in this.

The “value” attached to culture is a crucial component in mobilising indigenous people against the extension of further precarious conditions in maritime spaces. Deloughrey documents challenges to the US militarisation of the Pacific made vivid through the voyaging canoe metaphor in the poetry of Chamorro author, Craig Santos Perez;⁷⁹ the canoe is both a vessel for people and a means to navigate globalisation and colonisation, an image made material in the revitalisation of Pacific voyaging. Indeed, the ocean as a symbolic of distinctive Pacific lifeways, epitomised in Epeli Hau’ofa’s rallying cry “the ocean in us,”⁸⁰ has a long history, manifest, for instance, in the adoption of a moana (sea) ontology and epistemology by Pacific scholars.⁸¹ Human-non-human relations in marine spaces also evoke counter-movements. Goldberg-Hiller and Silva write of the connectivity between native Hawaiians and ocean dwelling non-human others, such as ancestral sharks, to question in what way a privileging of indigenous ideas of human boundaries has “created space for native Hawaiian aspirations for autonomy and self-determination?”⁸² Meanwhile, in New Zealand, the effect of human-induced mortality, including fishing, on the endemic Māui dolphin prompted a claim to the Waitangi Tribunal. In oral history, accounts of Ngahuia’s neighbouring hapū, a dolphin taniwha accompanied the ocean migration from Hawaiiki to Aoteaora, “connecting itself to the tribe such that the two interconnected constitute their identity.” Claimants argued that the government’s Threat Management Plan, by failing to ban gill-net and trawl fisheries in waters less than 100 metres deep, inadequately protected the species from extinction and thus breached the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi in failing to actively protect a taonga (treasure).⁸³

A recent scholarly interest in the ocean suggests the existence of distinctive seascape, wet and indigenous ontologies, saltwater socialities, multispecies relationships and the gendered nature of waves.⁸⁴ This is a welcome intervention after decades of neglect wherein the ocean was depicted as an anthropocentric mare nullius, or a frontier of scientific, technological and capitalist expansion devoid of sociality, people and sentient ocean inhabitants. Deloughrey notes, however, that the relatively poetic concepts of “fluidity, flows, routes and mobility” in this literatures serves to deemphasise the language of geopolitics, such as “mobile offshore bases [and] high-sea exclusion zones.”⁸⁵ While inequality on land is public knowledge, much less attention is paid to socio-economic inequities in marine spaces (though fisheries anthropologists have long written on this topic). Applying the concept of precarity to the maritime domain has the potential to generate critical insights. In this paper, I have used precarity to explain the specific means by which saltwater socio-natures are being comprehensively transformed, pointed to the distinctive features of precarity for indigenous peoples in colonial settler states, and analysed the way that both crises interact. This is especially important as the world’s oceans become the marine components of a general environmental crisis in which “the very sources of overharvesting, pollution, and carbon dioxide emission are also thinking, responding actors.”⁸⁶ itq fisheries management, I have argued, signifies a hyper privatised nature in which agency is constrained by systemic biases. Māori settlement quota, however, simultaneously references something else, the precarity of indigeneity, for instance, and the artful balancing of communalism and individualism in a post-settlement era. Here fish on a commercial vessel, designated as either quota stock or customary take, serves as a vivid metaphor.

Comment on Fiona McCormack’s “Precarity, Indigeneity and the Market in Māori Fisheries”

Jason Mika

Massey University

j.p.mika@massey.ac.nz

In her article, Fiona McCormack establishes Māori fisheries as a narrative representative of the possession-dispossession-repossession cycle of Māori rights over lands and waterways, which is to be found in every deed for the settlement of treaty claims in Aotearoa New Zealand. As an Indigenous people in full, exclusive and undisturbed possession of their lands, forests, fisheries and other properties, guaranteed to them under the Treaty of Waitangi of 1840, there ought not have been anything for Māori to worry about;⁸⁷ but as McCormack demonstrates, there was indeed. A settler populace intent on acquiring previously unavailable means for their prosperity, a cadre of unscrupled European entrepreneurs profiting from Māori land sales, and a complicit colonial government with an immediately contested claim to sovereignty, all made the eventual dispossession of Māori fisheries inevitable.⁸⁸

The diabolical saga of Māori fisheries is lucidly recounted in the Waitangi Tribunal’s 1988 report on the Muriwhenua fishing claim.⁸⁹ Importantly, the tribunal⁹⁰ finds, among other things, that: (i) pre-contact Māori controlled New Zealand’s fisheries trade using customary methods equal or surperior to those introduced; (ii) under the treaty, Māori rights to fisheries were protected, unless Māori agreed to relenquish them; (iii) from 1866 onward the Crown implemented laws that removed Māori control over their fisheries, providing Māori with small fishing reserves that were never implemented; (iv) the Crown assisted non-Māori into the business of fishing, eventually making fishing an unlicenced activity from 1963, causing over-fishing, which was to be addressed through quota as new property right. The tribunal concluded that the Crown had failed in its treaty obligation by awarding non-Māori fishing rights that were guaranteed to Māori under the Treaty of Waitangi.⁹¹ The quota management system (qms) in effect maintained prejudicial assumptions of Māori fishing rights as noncommercial and inconsequential, dominant themes in colonial narrative and policy since 1866.⁹²

In June 1988, Māori and Crown representatives met in Wellington to discuss the implications of the tribunal’s findings, beginning a process of settlement negotiation.⁹³ Māori commercial fisheries claims were finally settled in two main statutes.⁹⁴ First, the Māori Fisheries Act 1989⁹⁵ established the Māori Fisheries Commission whose role was threefold: (i) to facilitate Māori entry into the business and activity of fishing; (ii) to receive 10 per cent of commercial quota; and (iii) to administer $10 million in settlement cash.⁹⁶ This was regarded as an interim settlement. Second, the Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act 1992⁹⁷ implemented the deed of settlement for Māori fisheries claims (the “Sealord deal”) signed between Māori and the Crown on 23 September 1992.⁹⁸ As part of this settlement, the Crown gave Māori $150 million to buy a 50 per cent share of Sealord Products (now Sealord Group) and allocated to Māori 20 per cent of new quota added to the qms.⁹⁹ In return, Māori agreed that all their commercial rights were settled, and in addition, they agreed to customary fishing regulations, to halt litigation and claims and to support the qms.¹⁰⁰ The allocation of these settlement rights and assets to Māori took somewhat longer, finally resolved by the Māori Fisheries Act 2004, which reconstituted Te Ohu Kaimoana to oversee the allocation process and Aotearoa Fisheries to manage Māori commercial fishing interests.¹⁰¹

While Māori are just getting back into the business and activity of fishing, at the iwi (tribes) and pan-iwi levels at least, four important points allude to the kind of precarity that McCormack discusses. First, as participants in the business of fishing, Māori are obliged, like other commercial operators, to seriously consider how they are going to be sustainable in their fishing activities given the effects of oceanic pollution, especially, for example, the insidious nature of micro-plastics¹⁰² and the risks of overfishing.¹⁰³ Second, in an industry dominated by large-scale processors shielded by high entry costs,¹⁰⁴ how are iwi (tribes) enabling whānau (families) and hapū (subtribes) to participate in the business of fishing?¹⁰⁵ Third, how is mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) being integrated into Māori fisheries and responding to emerging science-based regimes like ecosystem-based management (ebm)?¹⁰⁶ The fourth issue relates to the vigilance required to guard against contemporary breaches of the treaty through, for example, decisions which attempt to usurp Māori marine-based property rights.¹⁰⁷

Case study evidence suggests Māori marine-based enterprises are incorporating oceanic sustainability into their strategies and activities, but the pace, scope and effect of this is mediated by the need to maintain viable enterprises.¹⁰⁸ Some iwi are supportive of whānau and hapū-based enterprises and are contributing quota and other resources for this purpose, while others are less inclined or able to do so.¹⁰⁹ The Māori marine economy remains dominated by a few large-scale pan-iwi and iwi enterprises with the quota and capacity to participate across the fisheries value chain.¹¹⁰ Collaboration among iwi, initially to collectively trade quota, is expanding, and in some instances, extending to the processing and marketing of fish in conjunction with established fishing enterprises.¹¹¹ Collectivisation is helping alleviate the tyranny of capital constraints and active management by Māori of their fisheries resources is developing essential human capabilities. The Tangaroa Research programme within the Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge is contributing “new” knowledge on how “old” knowledge is shaping Māori participation in the business and activity of fishing and blue economies generally.¹¹² Reid, Rout, and Mika,¹¹³ for instance, present an institutional analysis on how power and control over Māori fisheries remains concentrated in the hands of officials and a web of governmental entities divorced from Māori communities. Clearly, any shift in marine policy toward ecosystem-based management must be commensurate with not only protecting, but upholding Māori marine-based property rights consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.¹¹⁴

Now returning to McCormack’s treatment. Precarity has evolved as a contemporary political concept to describe a sense of powerlessness and placelessness, particularly of displaced labour, but of other vulnerable groups as well, separated from states of institutional stability to an enforced existential contingency.¹¹⁵ Precarity in this sense is attributed to capitalistic exploitation and policies, which reinforce its prevalence from which self-extrication is extremely difficult.¹¹⁶ Precarity is also associated with resistance of the precariat against socioeconomic disparity and structural disadvantage, including for example, the EuroMayDay protests.¹¹⁷ While rarely associated with indigeneity, McCormack relates three forms of precarity to Māori fisheries: (i) the precarity of ownership and dispossession as earlier recounted; (ii) environmental precarity as viewed from Indigenous ecological knowledge and experience; and (iii) the precarity of Māori labour, which has deep colonial and capitalist roots, which according to McCormack, has overtones of personal and institutional racism.

McCormack uses precarity as an analytical device to reveal multiple discontinuities in Māori fisheries, challenging assumptions about colonial dispossession as fait accompli, a natural order of disempowerment for the good of a nascent settler state and postcolonial repossession of Māori marine assets through treaty settlements as fair and just, full and final. As McCormack points out: “[t]his distinction is critical if we are to resist the tendency of precarity to dehistoricise and flatten inequalities, or otherwise divert attention away from the structural causes of precarity towards subjective experiences.” Is it possible to fully appreciate the causality and perpetuity of dispossession by studying the experience of the dispossessed? Not according to McCormack; studying dispossession and the role of the dispossessor are also necessary.

Thus, while precarity is usually stripped of its historical and structural antecedents, McCormack averts this limitation to illustrate how the colonial ideology of replacing one paradigm with another succeeded in Māori fisheries, not as a single shot-policy affecting a few individuals over a confined space, but the entire country and all Māori and their fisheries. Intimate relationships between Māori and their salt water resources regulated over preceding centuries by an epistemology and ontology of ecological interdependency were supplanted by market-centred, state-led capitalism. Treaty rights were replaced by an assumption of marine and coastal spaces as common property, devoid of their indigeneity. This is evident in the separation between Māori as kaitiaki or human custodians and their kin — the fish as non-human actors in salt water spaces. McCormack urges care in avoiding reinforcing imprecise depictions of precarity, which mask egregious acts as irreversible and socioeconomic disparity as natural because there is no alternative.

In a post settlement era, McCormack argues that individual transferable quota (itq) systems “dichotomise nature and culture, facilitate capital accumulation and generate class inequality, which occurs irrespective of the decision of Māori leaders to act in capitalist or non-capitalist ways.” The precarity of indigeneity in Māori fisheries for McCormack is structural and ongoing; treaty settlement organisations are forced to separate customary and commercial take, focus on wealth generation even in the absence of Māori fishers and sustain the new institution of customary fisheries with unpaid labour. In order to restore their fishing rights, interests and knowledge systems, Māori must participate in a system that reinforces the precarity of their indigeneity.

Despite the rigidities of precarity, McCormack also sees the concept as a mobilising force for re-establishing an “affective and livelihood dimension of fishing” for Māori. This is exemplified through pātaka kai (food storehouse) systems for distributing fish caught by commercial means for customary purposes and the re-emergence of Indigenous knowledge systems, challenging dominant Euro-American assumptions of the oceans as disembedded economic resources available for unending exploitation within ecological limits.¹¹⁸ McCormack draws on a vast array of relationships (cultural, practical, commercial, communal, aesthetic, historic and contemporary) Māori have had and do have with their maritime spaces to highlight the need for change in structural (systemic and institutional) objectivities rather than personal subjectivities alone in responding to manifestations of precarity in the indigeneity of Māori fisheries.

While precarity might be apt to expose anomalies in our memories and assumptions about the goodness and rightness of capitalism, there is some doubt over its capacity to elucidate viable alternative conceptualisations of economy.¹¹⁹ However, McCormack successfully manages to show movement in this direction, through reference to post-settlement Māori economic practice as to how Māori are confronting precarity in fisheries. This includes actions to satiate consumptive needs of Māori for fish using hybrid systems of commercial and customary harvest, efforts to re-engage in the cultural and commercial activity of fishing as owners, managers and workers within Māori fishing enterprises, and restoring cultural, pragmatic and spiritual connectivity to the moana (seas) and cultural narratives of the moana. The case for precarity as a perceptive analytical tool within Māori fisheries is made, but the story of how precarity as a mobilising agent will play out in tension-filled post-settlement tribal economies under emerging scientific, economic and policy regimes for the management of marine environments is still unfolding.¹²⁰

Enclosing Blue Commons, Generating Blue Growth? Comment on Fiona McCormack’s “Precarity, Indigeneity and the Market in Māori Fisheries”

Edyta Roszko

Chr. Michelsen Institute

edyta.roszko@cmi.no

The official opening of the 4^th International Symposium on Fisheries Crime taking place in Copenhagen in October, 2018 started with remarks about the “huge potential in marine spaces we control,” which are now threatened by transnational organized fisheries crime – the umbrella term for a wide spectrum of illegal activities in fisheries. Co-hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries, the Nordic Council of Ministers and the United Nations, the symposium promoted at the center of its agenda a “healthy ocean ecosystem ensured by sustainable farming and fishing operations as precondition of blue growth.”¹²¹ Here, the concept of “blue growth” denoted a reconstitution of the relation between “sustainability” and “extraction” – a nexus evolving in various historical and geographic contexts, but particularly through the operation of enclosures, capitalist accumulation and struggle for resources.¹²² In this process, so-called “blue commons” such as seas and oceans are emerging as a political space characterized by climate uncertainty, territorial conflicts, transnational organized fisheries crime as well as marine and maritime governance, which pushes various “sustainable development” agendas that are increasingly wound up with capitalist accumulation processes.

In her article “Precarity, Indigeneity and the Market in Māori Fisheries,” anthropologist Fiona McCormack brings to our attention the relation between enclosures, capitalist accumulation and struggle for resources in Māori fisheries that operates precisely within the conflicting binaries of sustainability and extraction. Paradoxically, the introduction of a property rights system for fisheries in New Zealand in the early 1990s and the translation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi into Māori historical rights to ocean commons is now articulated in terms of individual fishing rights and quotas. However, an adverse consequence of embracing a private property rationale was that the tribal relations within the hierarchical structure of Māori society were replaced with capitalist ones, alienating Māori not only from their ancestral fishing grounds but also from each other. What McCormack convincingly shows in her article is that the incorporation of Māori fisheries into an Individual Transferable Quota system aggravated colonial era dispossessions, turning social relations – that historically sustained Māori society for centuries – into a new asset-based capitalist management regime. Such a shift from communal to individual, neo-liberal ownership creates not only environmental but also existential precarity. Here, economic opportunity rather than collective interest dictates and facilitates the process of extracting economic value from the sea, thereby positioning Māori fisheries between aspired sustainability and actual extraction, consequently accelerating the ecological demise of marine spaces.

I would like to take this point further to allow us to view the past and present as analytically interconnected temporal scales of analysis. Importantly, this approach also allows for a view of the present as a historically contingent outcome of historical processes. Historically, the clash between enclosures and commons has a long genealogy, going to the heart of colonization and dispossession in the Americas, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Karl Marx was the first to theorize enclosures as dispossession that forced peasant off their land and thus proletarianized them (i.e. forced to sell their labor/bodies) in what could be called an early instance of precarity.¹²³ Drawing on Marx’s discussion of primitive accumulation as a historical moment of separation of producers from the means of production, historian E.P. Thompson pointed out that the Great Enclosure was as a global “movement” that was established first in England and Western Europe and then spread out to other parts of the world, introducing private property of and exclusive access to resources.¹²⁴

Some historians extended his argument by arguing that “[w]hile the long-run tendency may indeed have been in the direction of an enclosed private property regime that largely excluded natives, colonization was also accompanied by the establishment of commons.”¹²⁵ The dispossession of colonized people took place precisely “through the clash of an indigenous commons and a colonial commons” – as Allan Greer argues.¹²⁶ The European settlers established their open commons in economic practice, only later followed by government and laws.¹²⁷ Moreover, a perceived lack of productivity of the “natives” was used precisely as an argument for colonization because unproductive land and resources had to be exploited by (European) “man.” In the postwar years of the 1920s, the new colonial policies would find its way in the rhetoric of mise en valeur (translated as economic valorization) according to which the colonial powers should guide colonial societies towards increasing their productivity, thereby improving their own economic situation.¹²⁸

Let me dwell on Greer’s idea of the clash between indigenous and colonial commons to conceptualize how the oceans and seas are political spaces, which are more and more tied up with capitalist accumulation. What I found interesting in the context of New Zealand is that Māori people had a separate word for “sovereignty” over the sea denoting the control over near-shore and offshore fishing grounds, which, in turn, were an extension of their territorial control over the land.¹²⁹ In principle, we could say that the vernacular Māori notion of sovereignty as an extension of land did not differ much from the European seventeenth century cannon-shot rule by which a “state has territorial sovereignty of that coastal area within three miles of land.”¹³⁰ Yet, it differed substantially from the European capitalist notion of property in the sense that control over sea areas was not “something that could be individually owned and alienated.”¹³¹

Thus, when in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries European settlers arrived in New Zealand, they did not recognize Māori sovereignty over areas and resources in “open seas.” Such blunt denial was made possible because their own conception of the commons was based on Hugo Grotius’ (1583–1645) influential notion that the high seas cannot be possessed and, because of that, the use of sea is granted to all by natural law.¹³² According to this logic the two main uses of the high seas – navigation and fishing – were considered inexhaustible and for that reason Europeans argued that they must remain open to all.¹³³ The incompatibility of indigenous and European logics resulted in a situation that the Māori sea commons – particularly, their fishing grounds lying further offshore – were acknowledged neither by colonial courts nor by governments.¹³⁴ Furthermore, the clash between an indigenous commons and a colonial commons was also perpetuated through a capital-intensive, technology-driven and putatively “civilized” operation of labor introduced by the Europeans. With their historical modes of access and operation at sea and lacking private capital that could acquire ships, engines and refrigeration, Māori fishers could not compete with the new advanced technologies of harvesting and storage technologies and, therefore, were practically excluded from the sea.¹³⁵ The gradual dispossession of Māori and the consecutive removal of their communal access rights to the sea led them to realize that by re-claiming sovereignty over their fisheries – which was theoretically (but never practically) guaranteed in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi – they could claim Individual Transferable Quota, in order to be able to participate in capitalist extraction of marine resources from which they were largely excluded.

If we think now through the binary of indigenous and colonial commons, McCormack’s argument is even more interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that the Individual Transferable Quota emerged as part of “Māori indigenous claims against colonial alienations,” which led to a fusion of customary and capitalist modes of operation.¹³⁶ Secondly, it shows that collective sovereignty as a right to specific areas and resources was used to claim private property and access to marine resources, thereby contributing to maritime enclosures. This begs the question of how the historically recent legal regime of exclusive economic zones (eez) plays out in this specific postcolonial process of capitalist accumulation.

Territorial waters of twelve nautical miles and eez of 200 nautical miles outward from the coast into the sea – as defined by a new legal regime known as the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – gave coastal states full authority to exercise exclusive sovereignty rights over the exploration, exploitation and conservation of all natural resources within those limits.¹³⁷ As the new regime became widely accepted and globalized, most of the countries enclosed or seek to enclose and nationalize their fisheries and ocean spaces within the maritime border of the new eezs. In other words, eezs allow coastal countries to extend their territorial sovereignty and, in some cases, to claim high seas or open sea areas – that until the late twentieth century was a zone of connection and a resource commons – as their exclusive state property. From this perspective, Māori sovereignty’s claims and their embrace of the Individual Transferable Quota system position themselves within such historically recent state ownership of the sea.

While Māori used sovereignty rights to participate in capitalist production, my own research on fisheries in Vietnam and China in the disputed South China Sea shows an opposite process, namely that capitalist extraction of marine resources could be used to claim sovereignty over the sea. The expansion and overlaps between the maritime borders of the new eezs of China, Vietnam and several asean countries result in a situation where marine resources function as a sort of “rival goods,” particularly between Vietnamese, Chinese and the Filipino fishers. These fishers exploit high value marine resources – including endangered species such as giant clams, red coral reef, sea turtles and sea cucumber – in such quantities that it prevents other users from accessing them and in so doing they turn massive exploitation into sovereignty claims in the South China Sea.¹³⁸ At the same time, however, driven by growing demand for fish and the simultaneous decline of marine resources in their coastal waters, both China and Vietnam encourage fishers to shift from inshore to offshore fishing in the South China Sea by providing heavy subsidies. For example, in order to be eligible for state support, Vietnamese fishers have to make four fishing trips a year, each lasting 15 days and going out at least 150 nautical miles within the South China Sea. Since 2015, small Vietnamese fishing fleets have been appearing in the coastal waters of Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia, Palau, northern Australia, Vanuatu Islands, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Tokelau where they engaged in harvesting of high value marine goods.¹³⁹ In the case of China, those fishers who operate in the disputed waters of the South China Sea receive additional fishing subsidies.¹⁴⁰ China reinforces this trend by providing heavy subsidies to fishers to purchase steel-hulled trawlers equipped with high-tech navigational and communication systems and by expanding their operations to the Pacific, Indian and Atlantic Oceans.¹⁴¹ While both China and Vietnam do not directly support overfishing or the extraction of highly-valued endangered marine species in national or foreign eezs, the fishers’ presence and activities in the disputed and severely depleted waters of the South China Sea serve as a manifestation of those countries’ sovereignty rights. Competing for fishing grounds and marine goods, Chinese, Vietnamese and the Filipino fishers occasionally get into violent clashes, while on other occasions they choose to make profitable trading deals with each other whilst still at sea.¹⁴²

What a summary comparison of fisheries in New Zealand and in the South China Sea shows is that when parts of oceans and seas became territorially bounded state property, fishers’ relations with their customary fishing grounds transformed dramatically and became linked to capitalist accumulation. In that sense, eezs could be conceptualized as the first step towards the privatization of seas and oceans that made possible such initiatives as the Individual Transferable Quota system or so-called blue growth, which includes oil and gas concessions given to big multinational companies or blue bioeconomy, just to mention a few examples.¹⁴³ In my view, the alienation of fishers’ labor and the displacement of actual participation of fisheries at the sea is a central issue in McCormack’s article – a phenomenon that could be observed around the globe, including in the South China Sea where the Individual Transferable Quota system is absent. From this perspective, whether this is the establishment of an Individual Transferable Quota system or subsidies provided to Chinese and Vietnamese fisheries, both management schemes reflect a global process of blue growth-cum-blue enclosures and of capitalist governance of seas and oceans that are taking different forms on regional and local levels.

In this context, the legal regime of eezs – with all its paradoxical manifestations, such as the Individual Transferable Quota system, fishery subsidies, and so on – inserts itself into a new rhetoric and practice of blue growth, as a new enactment of mise en valeur. In that regard, the old colonial obsession to make land, woodlands, swamps, marshes, lakes, rivers, oceans and seas productive turns full circle in the present-day capitalist rhetoric of blue growth according to which the oceans and seas are supposed to “produce food for billions of people, generate income for millions, and remain in a ‘wilderness’ state.”¹⁴⁴ In this process, blue growth denotes a new round of ongoing enclosures that privatizes global commons and public assets and allows for the emergence of new competing modes of production.¹⁴⁵ The power of McCormack’s essay lies in her ability to show that when people reclaim their rights but organize their labor and extraction within the current capitalist mode of production, this gives rise to both alienation and more conditions of precarity.

AcknowledgmentThe research and writing for this commentary received support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 802223).

Response to Comments

Fiona McCormack

University of Waikato

fio@waikato.ac.nz

I appreciate the thorough reading and provocative commentary provided by Jason Mika and Edyta Roszko, both of whom draw attention to issues at the heart of my essay. For Roszko the “conflicting binaries of sustainability and extraction” inherent in Blue Economic expansions allow for an examination of contiguous history, that is, the colonial contestation between enclosures and commons. The resulting dispossessions, of people from land and the proletarianization of bodies, could, Roszko writes, be called “an early instance of precarity,” now visible in oceans and seas as these become more and more tied up with capitalist accumulation. For Mika, the precarity inherent in Māori fisheries manifests currently as tensions between collectivisation and the tyranny of capitalist constraints, for instance: the moral obligation to be sustainable in fishing activities and facilitate the livelihood aspirations of smaller Māori kin groups, whilst operating in the context of marine environmental deterioration and a fishing industry dominated by large-scale processors shielded by high entry costs. This tension is also reflected in the desire to integrate matauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) with scientific ecosystem-based management, while contending with a fisheries regime modelled on a single-species, extractive approach. Precarity is also expressed in the need to remain vigilant of attempts to effect dispossessions of indigenously reclaimed marine property rights. Both authors, thus, concur with my intervention in theorisations of precarity, and the need to reconceptualise the concept in the South.

There are three main pillars to the argument put forward in my essay: First, understanding indigenous precarity requires analytical attention be given to histories of dispossession enacted before and beyond the neoliberalisation of labour; second, the current condition of environmental precarity in marine environments is inclusive of human-non-human relationships and the production of inequality. These relationships are made further precarious by the implementation of market-based environmental technologies, such as Individual Transferable Quota (itq) systems in fisheries; and third, the incorporation of indigenous people into such regimes gives rise to a political ecology of the precarious, that is, the existence of existential precarity as kin groups grapple with the contradictions arising from participation in diametrically opposed value systems. There is a further strand to my argument as presented, that of the mobilising potential of precarity. In response to the insights offered by Mika and Roszko, I will attempt to extend my argument below.

Roszko suggests that a crucial axis of analysis is that of the relationship between sustainability and extraction, a nexus variously reconstituted across time and space, particularly through processes of enclosures, capitalist accumulation and the struggle for resources. In the context of seas and oceans, “blue commons” have emerged as a politicised space wherein the aforementioned phenomena are spectacularly played out – in conflicts surrounding transnational organized fishing crime, in the expansion of states’ territorial claims within and outside of Exclusive Economic Zones (eez) and in marine governance drives for sustainable development agendas, the latter of which are increasingly intertwined with market processes, such as those present in fish farming, capture fisheries, deep sea mining ventures though also in the financing of large-scale marine protected areas. For Roszko, the current situation positions Māori fisheries “between aspired sustainability and actual extraction,” and thereby contributes to ecological demise in marine spaces, a circumstance, she argues, that can be understood though historicising enclosures.

Drawing on the work of E.P. Thompson, Marx and Greer,¹⁴⁶ Roszko shows how colonial enclosures, characterised by capitalist accumulation and the imposition of new forms and relations of property, evolve over time. This momentum is captured in Greer’s argument that the dispossession of indigenous peoples takes place “through the clash of an indigenous commons and a colonial commons.”¹⁴⁷ That is, European settlers established their open commons in economic practices, to be then entrenched in governance and laws; a clash that is perpetuated “through a capital-intensive, technology driven and putatively ‘civilized’ operation of labour.”¹⁴⁸ In the case of Māori, this led to the removal of communal access rights to seascapes, their gradual alienation from commercial fisheries development and the eventual reclaiming of rights over fisheries, as guaranteed in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi; the Individual Transferable Quota property returned to Māori in compensation for historical alienations has, however, engendered their participation in a hyper privatised system wherein leasing quota to large corporations is, I observe, the predominant fishing activity engaged in by most tribes.

Roszko astutely identifies the imposition of 200 nautical mile Exclusive Economic Zones (eez) as a specific moment in a global trajectory, stimulating both capital accumulation and state-level marine enclosures, and questions how this historically recent legal regime, “plays out in this specific [New Zealand] postcolonial process of capitalist accumulation?” She posits a comparison between fisheries in the South China Sea and the development of Māori fisheries, thus “while Māori used sovereignty rights to participate in capitalist production … the disputed South China Sea shows an opposite process, namely that capitalist extraction of marine resources could be used to claim sovereignty over the sea.” I would like to complicate this comparison by revisiting the role of the eez in the development of industrial fisheries in New Zealand and the post-settlement (rather than post-colonial) incorporation of Māori into the itq system.¹⁴⁹

In her review of neoliberal economic theory in fisheries management, Mansfield¹⁵⁰ shows how a concern with property has been a central feature since the 1950s, a period marking the infiltration of neoclassical economic thought into fisheries policy and a pre-Hardin articulation of the tragedy of the commons thesis.¹⁵¹ While eezs, as state-derived jurisdictions, may seem anachronistic to privatisation and the “rolling back” of state control, the hallmark of neoliberalisation, the very creation of this new expanse set the stage for new rounds of privatisation. Notably, fisheries economists generally supported the move towards expanded political jurisdiction in the oceans as it had the redeeming feature that the space could be subjected to further enclosures through limited licenses or other privatisation schemes.¹⁵²

Until the 1960s commercial fishing was a relatively small-scale activity in New Zealand, subjugated to agriculture, the “backbone” of the economy.¹⁵³ Most of the fleet traditionally concentrated in the inshore sector and distribution was largely confined to the domestic market. A desire for expansion became prevalent in the early 1960s, as indicated by the establishment of a Fishing Industry Board in 1963 mandated to champion economic growth. The extension of state property, from three, to nine, to twelve miles, culminating in the declaration of the eez in 1977, was also a significant driver. Much of the incentive for these expansive property claims came from the perceived encroachment of foreign fishing vessels into offshore waters (those between 12nm and 200nm) and the desire to recapture this fishing wealth. In 1977, for instance, ninety percent of the 476,000 tonnes of demersal finfish catch from the eez area was caught by vessels mainly from Japan, Korea and the Soviet Union.¹⁵⁴ The Ministry in charge of fisheries addressed this by the setting of Total Allowable Catches (tacs) for deeper-water species in the eez, allocating these preferentially to the domestic industry, and only subsequently to foreign fleets under license and government bilateral agreements. Hence, similar to the situation described by Roszko in the case of disputed fisheries in the South China Sea, advancing the capitalist extraction of marine resources was used by the New Zealand state to claim sovereignty over the sea. This motivation is also evident in the implementation of itq fisheries.

By the early 1980s, a global discourse in fisheries economics had emerged advocating the advantages of privatisation and, contrarily, the dire consequences of open access ownership, as state eezs were by then conceived. This repositioning of state eezs as open access, alongside the ongoing existence of foreign vessels in offshore waters, was a powerful impetus behind the move to privatise fishing rights in New Zealand. By 1979, 26 joint ventures existed, exploiting species not generally caught by New Zealand vessels. In 1982, tax incentives, which had been used to entice domestic companies to enter into partnering relationships, were removed in preparation for the introduction of itqs. Importantly, the introduction of this technology was seen as a means through which the domestic industry could increase business opportunities and build capacity in the deep-water sector. Indeed, the security offered by the privatisation of fishing rights is perceived as responsible for quota holders investing in deep-water fishing vessels and in the growth of foreign exports.¹⁵⁵

The development of Māori fisheries within the context of capitalist accumulation and the advancement of states’ marine sovereignty claims, as described, needs further elaboration. Rather than using indigenous sovereignty rights to participate in capitalist production, Māori claims to fisheries are situated in a longer decolonial narrative within which the relationship between kin, the sea and non-human others is given prominence. This sociality is detailed in interview excerpts and ethnographic descriptions in my essay. It is also apparent in the reflections of Archie Taiaroa, a Māori leader, on the 1992 fisheries settlement in which he gives prominence to dreams and hopes for a future and of Māori claiming their birthright as tangata whenua (people of the land).¹⁵⁶ Importantly, the fisheries legislation introduced to implement itqs evoked large-scale Māori opposition to their exclusion from newly privatised fishing rights as well as the imposition of a regime deemed incompatible with indigenous ways of organising the economy. While the former critique was eventually countered by the Crown’s promise to distribute fishing quota to tribes, the latter was quelled by the Crown’s refusal to consider any other fisheries management system, ominous comments regarding the threat of opposition to the progress of other indigenous treaty settlements¹⁵⁷ and the very real possibility that once privatised, fishing rights would be transferred out of Māori ownership in perpetuity.¹⁵⁸

Translating Individual Transferable Quota into recompensated Māori fishing rights is a highly contested process, involving mediation between ostensibly different economies and value systems. Although the end result may be similar, that is, the settlement of Māori claims to fisheries has given rise to their participation in itq neoliberalisations, this does not imply that indigeneity is thus motivated, nor that indigenous subjectivity is transformed. Indeed the “political ecology of the precarious” I refer to in my essay describes the contradictory socio-natures that arise when indigeneity becomes entangled with market environmentalism. It is worth re-emphasising the constraints imposed by this articulation.

An orientation towards property rights as a means to regulate the profit motive of individuals, is fundamental to neoliberal attempts to rationalise fisheries; itq systems do so by harnessing individual decision making to assumed economic and ecological realities. Carothers and Chambers, for instance, show how discourses of neoliberalisation combine with those linking the ecological health of the world’s oceans to the widespread implementation of private property. The resultant discursive formation has enrolled a broad set of vocal and powerful proponents to “make these logics appear natural, defining features of human society.”¹⁵⁹ itqs then become truthlike, naturalised beyond critique, making it difficult “to imagine how things could have been ordered differently.”¹⁶⁰ Similarly, in his analysis of salmon quota fisheries in southeast Alaskan communities, Langdon shows how powerful “leviathan” interests operate to secure itq endurance as well as alienate indigenous Alaskan fisheries.¹⁶¹ In itq governance the type of property characterising Māori commercial fisheries is referred to as a Community Development Quota. As such, the assumption in neoliberal fisheries rationalisations that some type of property rights are necessary to harness and regulate the profit motive of individuals, or communities, is apparent. Rather than a recognition of indigenous people as having unique rights, Community Development Quota suggests the need for indigenous people to use their resources more efficiently. Further, the neoliberal governmentality performed in itqs, by incentivising fishing participants to act as rational individuals who maximise individual financial return at all costs,¹⁶² conceals the role of privatisation in transforming Māori social relations, institutions, communities and organisations. This neoliberal governmentality persists in the marketisation of fishing rights, directing attention to the financial health of quota in trading markets as opposed to stewardship over the sea.

In Mika’s response to my essay, the alienation of Māori ocean commons takes on an added affective tone as it confronts the violence of settler colonialism as acted on his kin. Referring to the “diabolical saga of Māori fisheries,” Mika shows how racist assumptions regarding the “non-commercial and inconsequential” nature of indigenous fisheries was implemented in fisheries legislation from colonisation through to the introduction of the Quota Management System. And, irrespective of the “full and final” settlement of Māori fisheries in 1992, sovereignty is far from assured: “power and control … remains concentrated in the hands of officials and a web of governmental entities divorced from Māori communities.” Further, the articulation of indigeneity with market environmentalism produces tensions, “in order to restore their fishing rights, interests and knowledge system, Māori must participate in a system that reinforces the precarity of their indigeneity.” Mika, however, also stresses the longevity of Māori ocean commons, the ongoing extension of social relations between humans and between humans and non-human others, irrespective of the prejudices embedded in settler colonial political ecologies and the possession-dispossession-repossession cycle of Māori fisheries. Drawing on these indigenous resources, precarity is mobilised to confront the need for structural change.

By emphasising the vast array of relationships Māori have with maritime spaces, including cultural, practical, commercial, communal, aesthetic, historic and contemporary ones, Mika provokes a re-consideration of the commons in ocean environments. Different understandings of the commons exist: those rooted in Hardin’s tragedy thesis,¹⁶³ which cast the commons as a market failure, a proposition especially prominent in fisheries economics and management;¹⁶⁴ and those propounded by common property theorists who argue, conversely, that under certain conditions local people implement rules for the successful management of common pool resources.¹⁶⁵ Commons are also perceived to arise as an outcome of statecraft, as illustrated in the extension of territorial seas to 200 nautical miles and the creation of marine protected areas, as well as in the reconfiguration of indigenous marine tenures to better align with the interests of colonial states.¹⁶⁶ Additionally, commons may be ethnographically described as an interweaving of people and the sea, wherein a different nature-culture binding is theorised to occur.¹⁶⁷ Following this, scholarship on commoning makes a distinction between the commons as property, bounded and confined to legalistic realms, and commoning as relationality, which, being freed from attachment to “things” has a transformative capacity.¹⁶⁸

What Mika clearly shows, however, in the case of Māori fisheries, is that the transformative capacity of commons for indigenous peoples is tied to reclaimed property, now reconstituted as fishing quota, and that property, in its signification of invaluable, inalienable, indigenous wealth, is being used to negotiate precarity. Hence, post-settlement economic practices include, “actions to satiate consumptive needs of Māori for fish using hybrid systems of commercial and customary harvest, efforts to re-engage in the cultural and commercial activity of fishing as owners, managers and workers within fishing enterprises, and restoring cultural, pragmatic and spiritual connectivity to the moana (seas) and cultural narratives of the moana.” Rather than grand moments of disruption, these openings point to the resistance, manipulation and/or reinterpretation enforced on itq neoliberalisations by collectivities, and indeed, market based regimes for exploiting and conserving the environment more generally. In the context of accelerating environmental degradation, the types of social and economic organisation as well as ecological interdependency these actions intimate, deserve critical attention.