The territorialization of transnational sustainability governance: production, power and globalization in Iceland’s fisheries

ABSTRACT

To contribute to the literature on transnational sustainability governance hybrids, a new fisheries certification program in Iceland that was originally developed as an alternative to the non-governmental Marine Stewardship Council is examined. While this new program appears on the surface to constitute a purely nationalistic reaction against external non-state authority, the new governance institution is also non-governmental and incorporates international norms and institutions. To explain this new governance hybrid, Robert Cox’s International Political Economy approach to production and power is engaged. This approach theorizes the co-constitution of the social forces of production, state–society complexes and global governance. It is argued that the Icelandic case is not entirely localized or unique; it is part of a broader movement in which social forces of production respond to new market-oriented transnational sustainability governance institutions by developing territorially embedded but transnationally legitimate alternatives.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational sustainability
• hybrid governance
• certification
• fisheries
• Iceland
• Robert Cox

Acknowledgment

I thank the Grenfell Campus Start-up Fund at Memorial University for funding the research, Elizabeth Havice for shaping some of the ideas developed here, two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and the editor for carefully scrutinizing final drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I compiled an initial list of potential key informants through a review of government and fishing industry websites. Once in the field, I employed a snowball sampling technique whereby some existing recruits identified other key informants. I recorded interviews digitally and transcribed each. I then analyzed and interpreted the content of the text data to identify major themes and patterns.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Grenfell Campus Start-up Fund at Memorial University of Newfoundland.