Producing difference: the political economy of small-scale fisheries governance on Colombia’s Pacific coast

© 2017 Dr. Paula Satizábal PosadaThe importance of small-scale fisheries for coastal people has been largely overlooked. Governments have often framed oceans as open access spaces prioritising processes of capital accumulation that have had major socio-environmental impacts. Neoliberal approaches to fisheries and environmental governance have relied on territorialisation processes and market-oriented mechanisms to control and ensure the conservation and sustainable use of fishing resources. This thesis investigates how the political economy of small-scale fisheries governance has led to the production of difference and interacted with place-based institutional processes. I have studied the participatory process undertaken by nine coastal Afro-descendant villages along the Gulf of Tribugá in the Pacific coast of Colombia, that led to the creation of a marine protected area. Critically, I examine how difference materialises and manifests in multiple ways by way of: i) territorialisation processes; ii) commodification of fish; and iii) neoliberal biodiversity conservation. I draw on political ecology and geographies of the sea to analyse how the production of difference has influenced place-based institutional processes, social relations, and socio-natural interactions. I argue that the expansion of the political economy of fish and the processes that led to the creation of the marine protected area have enforced static, homogeneous, and atemporal images of reality at sea that fail to reflect the complex and fluid dynamics shaping the lives of coastal dwellers. Sea materialities, social relations, and socio-natural interactions are central in the production of place-based institutional processes. As such, this research highlights the need for legal and political instruments for the recognition of waterscapes as social spaces, and the inclusion of coastal fishing communities in the negotiation of fisheries governance and marine territorialisation processes