Beyond Design Principles: Subjectivity, Emotion, and the (Ir)Rational Commons

Abstract

Common property debates are dominated by approaches that seek to demonstrate how cooperation is “rational”; by working together under appropriate institutions, the commons becomes a viable management strategy. This article seeks to expand the commons debate by arguing that more attention is needed on the emotional and “ir-rational” reasons people cooperate. Drawing from feminist theory, subjectivity, and power, I explore how subjectivity is bound up in kinship and community obligations, such that people draw from alternative rationalities to develop informal modes of cooperation. These affective relations are important for people's willingness (or not) to cooperate in more organized contexts, demonstrating the importance of thinking about gender, community, and space as productive of subjectivity, rather than roles or structures in order to understand how particular forms of cooperation emerge. The result is a new understanding of cooperation that incorporates new feminist research on emotion and subjectivity with institutional studies.

Keywords:

• common property
• cooperation
• emotion
• fisheries
• gender
• subjectivity

I would like to give a special thanks to the people on the west coast who contributed their time, thoughts, and patience to my project. They have shown a generosity in working with me that helped me to better understand the importance of the “community obligations” I discuss. I also thank David Donan, Jim Atkinson, Jim Watson, and Hamish Mair for discussions on the policy context and pressures facing the fishery and being open to thinking about the social science aspects of the science they do. I owe a special debt to the Feminist Geography Reading Group at the University of Edinburgh (especially Liz Bondi and Deborah Thein), as it was in that forum that my ideas around subjectivity, emotion, and its importance in collective action first emerged. Finally, three anonymous reviewers and the editor, Thomas Beckley, provided exceptionally productive, insightful, and supportive reviews of the article. Their input helped me to develop a far stronger article; thank you. Any errors that remain are my own.

Notes

This is a paraphrase, as the conversation was an unrecorded phone interview.

This kind of theorization draws from other work on the mutual constitution of institutions, social relations, and spatial processes (Castree and MacMillan 2001; Haraway 1991; Nightingale 2003; Robbins 2001; Whatmore 2002), as well as work on the production of space and subjectivity (Butler 1997; Gibson 2001; Gibson-Graham 2002; Longhurst 2003; Probyn 2003; Agrawal 2005; Nightingale 2006) and similar work on fisheries (St. Martin 2006, 2007).

The in-shore fishery, up to the 6-mile limit, does not fall under the jurisdiction of the Common Fisheries Policy (CFP), but nevertheless, the CFP is an important overall context for the setting of quotas. The fact that whitefish boats—regulated under the CFP—also have use rights to the in-shore fisheries is just one example of how the two regimes interact.

Paraphrase from an unrecorded phone interview.

It is interesting that many of the skippers I know do not spend much time drinking in pubs. They are more likely to drink at parties or at home, whereas crew members, who tend to be younger and unmarried, do spend a lot of time in the pub.

In some instances there can be important differences between policymakers and fisheries regulators; however, in this section I am using them as synonyms.

Paraphrase from an unrecorded phone interview.

I am conscious that this discussion is framed only in terms of the fishermen's perspectives. This is in part due to the difficulties of interviewing policymakers on their experiences of the meeting room. My hope is that in the next phase of the research I will be able to better explore their perspectives.

Paraphrase from an unrecorded phone interview.