CPS: International Master‟s Programme in Human Ecology

Abstract: The socio-ecological conditions of fish-stock depletion pose great challenges to fish-dependent economies. Such challenges are currently felt on the Faroes, where fish and fish related products account for 94 percent of total exports. Hence, ideas on how to make the fisheries sustainable are thriving. By drawing attention to the diverse ways that Faroese have organised socio-ecological relations of fishing, and the different meanings or modes of knowing and perceiving the environment (rationalities) that socio-ecological relations of fishing have drawn upon, this thesis problematises the understanding of fish-stock depletion as a problem that can be solved through techno-scientific policies and institutional reform. By engaging in a critical analysis of narratives on sustainable fisheries and the environmental history of fishing on the Faroes, this thesis argues that fish-stock depletion is a material manifestation of a structural problem in the world-system, with onto-epistemological roots in the Cartesian paradigm of modernity of which neoclassical economics is a discursive expression.