Ocean grabbing, terraqueous territoriality and social development

ABSTRACT

This paper reframes the ocean-grabbing literature by moving beyond accounts where small-scale producers and communities are portrayed as only victims of states and capital. While state and corporate efforts to ‘grab’ resources require critical attention, the literature on ocean grabbing risks obscuring the multidimensional relations of less powerful agents. This paper engages access analysis to reveal complex spatial, social and political processes of inclusion/exclusion and roles of agents such as small-scale producers, trade unions, fishing communities and Indigenous people. Using the case of a circumpolar shrimp species, the paper examines how actors and interests in Canada legitimize access by asserting a form of terraqueous territoriality through claims of adjacency rights – the idea that people living on land contiguous to marine resources ought to have priority in developing these resources. Assertions of terraqueous territoriality enhance opportunities for marginalized groups to gain state endorsement of resource claims, but such assertions are contingent on other factors and progressively tenuous as the mobility and geographical distribution of marine species increases. The paper suggests that contingent ecological and social forces that influence access should receive greater analytical attention, particularly as climate change transforms spatial relations between land-based interests and mobile marine species.

KEYWORDS:

• fisheries
• enclosure
• political ecology
• territoriality
• ocean grabbing
• land grabbing

INTRODUCTION

The ocean enclosure movement of the 1970s and 1980s consolidated control of nearly one-third of the Earth's oceans under the territorial jurisdiction of coastal states. After the effective transformation of coastal spaces into state property through the extension of state sovereignty over exclusive economic zones (EEZs) (Campling & Havice, 2014), many states implemented fisheries-access regimes based on the logic of private property. Critical political economy and political ecology analyses have provided important insight into the exclusionary socio-spatial consequences of private-access regimes. The most popular mechanism of privatized access, individual transferable quotas (ITQs), had significant terrestrial impacts within EEZs in that they shifted resource access away from small and remote fishing-dependent communities to corporate interests based in larger and often urban fishing centres in contexts such as Canada, Iceland and Alaska (Carothers & Chambers, 2012; McCay, 2004; Olson, 2011; Pálsson & Helgason, 1995; Pinkerton, 2013; Pinkerton & Davis, 2015). In developing, as well as developed, countries, recent analyses have identified ITQs and related rights-based conservation initiatives as facilitating ocean grabbing, which refers broadly to a new wave of territorial enclosures and privatization driven by state, corporate and financial interests and diverting access to resource benefits away from small-scale fisheries and coastal community populations (Bennett, Govan, & Satterfield, 2015; De Schutter, 2012; Franco et al., 2014; Knott & Neis, 2017). However, recent analyses also suggest that more research is needed beyond the scope of access regimes facilitating ocean grabbing that threaten marginalized fish workers, small-scale fisheries and coastal community livelihoods more generally. There is a need for insight into access regimes and relations of production that resist or sit outside ocean-grabbing processes (Bennett et al., 2015; Pinkerton & Davis, 2015) or that could be understood as ocean grabbing for social-development purposes.

We propose to reframe the ocean-grabbing research agenda in this direction. The ocean-grabbing concept has been exclusively used in the literature in a pejorative way, which reflects a normative commitment (which we share) to defend local resource users and communities from the effects of dispossession caused by powerful grabbers such as government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or industry (Bavinck et al., 2017). However, reducing the term to a pejorative meaning referring only to state or corporate interests is analytically problematic, as it negates the possibility that local users can themselves act as agents of ocean grabbing. Is it not possible, for example, that conflicts among differently organized small-scale fisheries interests could result in ocean grabbing where one marginalized group is dispossessed while the other benefits? Moreover, local resistance to, and social movement mobilization against, ocean grabbing around the world provides insight not just into defensive strategies of marginalized groups (Bavinck et al., 2017) but also into potentially progressive forms of ocean grabbing whereby groups ‘grab’ or ‘grab back’ resources based on principles of social justice (e.g., Bankes, 2003). From this perspective, the key questions become: How can we better understand the conditions under which ocean grabbing occurs? Through what social and ethical principles is ocean grabbing legitimized? And ultimately: Ocean grabbing for whose benefit and for what purpose? In other words, rather than assume that ocean grabbing is inherently illegitimate and always undermines human security or livelihoods as recent insightful analyses suggest (e.g., Bavinck et al., 2017; Bennett et al., 2015), this paper asks: Are marginalized groups ‘grabbing’ or accessing resources for their own social development purposes and how are those groups legitimizing their appropriation of state property in the case of fisheries? Answers to such questions will help provide analytical and normative clarity on the politics of access and exclusion for state-owned coastal resources and spaces.

While states have facilitated the privatization and commodification of fishing access rights and ocean grabbing, they have also intervened in response to demands from marginalized groups based on social justice and moral economy principles. These alternatives include allocations that incorporate spatially informed principles of equitable resource access, distribution of benefits, development for marginalized rural and remote coastal communities, and limits on access for capital (McCay, 2011; Pinkerton, 2015; St. Martin, 2005). Although the role of states in facilitating the creation of commodified access rights is well documented, systematic, conceptual and empirical clarification is lacking on the complex interventions and multiple logics of state interventions as property owner and resource manager (Campling & Havice, 2014) and on the varied state responses to the demands and aspirations of marginalized social groups. This paper seeks to contribute to research highlighting the agency and interests of rural and remote coastal peoples as they seek to assert territoriality over state property. In doing so, the paper provides practical insight into how marginalized groups can ‘grab’ resources.

To shed a light on these issues, this paper examines how marginalized groups gained access to Pandalus borealis, a circumpolar species of shrimp fished in North America from the continental waters off Maine in the United States to the Canadian Arctic (hereafter referred to as northern shrimp). In this fishery, different groups claim adjacency rights – the idea that people living in close proximity to resources ought to have priority in accessing and benefiting from those resources. To bring analytical focus to our argument, we engage with access analysis as a way of exploring the agency, and structural constraints facing rural and remote coastal people as they mobilized the idea of adjacency to legitimize claims to state-owned resources (Hall, Hirsch, & Li, 2011; Ribot & Peluso, 2003). While the role of territoriality is prominent in access analyses of land-based resources, it has received less attention in political-economy and political-ecology analyses of fisheries despite the centrality of territory in the history of fisheries enclosures (Campling & Havice, 2014). The paper contributes to access analysis by examining adjacency as an assertion of a particular form of territoriality that can be understood through what Campling and Colás (2017) call ‘terraqueous territoriality’, an accumulation strategy seeking to transcend land–sea distinctions.

Drawing on the analysis of the northern shrimp fishery, the paper illustrates how different social actors position themselves to legitimize both their access claims and state endorsements of their access claims by mobilizing the idea of adjacency or adjacency rights. The paper argues that the distinct ecological conditions of production in fisheries influence the degree to which terraqueous territoriality can serve as a strategy for legitimizing access claims. In particular, territoriality strategies for offshore, mobile and dispersed fisheries such as northern shrimp face greater uncertainty and a higher likelihood for contested claims than more sedentary and near-shore resources where the creation of territorial boundaries linked to coastal interests and communities is more practical. For this reason, adjacency was a necessary but not a sufficient mechanism for groups to ‘grab’ access to northern shrimp. The argument here is that while territorial claims for offshore, dispersed and mobile resources are inevitably tenuous and less likely to result in bounded territories, terraqueous territoriality can nevertheless provide an effective anchor for facilitating resource access when combined with other justifications, such as historical attachment, development needs of marginalized groups and communities, and equity. The degree of success will depend on historical and political contingencies specific to the case. The paper, thus, makes two core contributions. First, it recasts the ocean-grabbing debate to include the agency of marginalized groups in struggles over ‘grabbing’ and access. This reframing includes a recognition of the antagonisms and compromises within and between these groups and the overlaps and alliances between these groups with state and capital (Foley & Mather, 2016; Foley, Mather, & Neis, 2015). Second, it advances the political ecology literature on the role of territoriality in resource access politics by bringing fisheries into discussions that have been almost exclusively limited to land by examining claims of adjacency rights as an assertion of terraqueous territoriality.

The paper is structured as follows. The next section describes how literatures in political ecology and social science of fisheries governance use concepts of access, territoriality and terraqueous territoriality. The third section introduces the case of northern shrimp in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean and explores the role of adjacency as an assertion of terraqueous territoriality through three periods of social–ecological change. The discussion and conclusions reflect on the analysis, situating the role of adjacency within a broader context of mechanisms and factors influencing access. While adjacency has limitations as a legitimating force in efforts of marginalized groups to secure access to fisheries resources, particularly offshore resources, the case of northern shrimp demonstrates how workers and communities on the margins of capitalism can use the idea of adjacency to ‘grab’ resources and gain state recognition for their claims. The paper ends by calling for empirical, analytical and political attention to the implications of climate change for spatially and geographically contingent resource access claims and conflicts.

ACCESS AND TERRITORIALITY

Access analysis and territoriality offer conceptual opportunities to clarify the processes implied by the notion of ocean grabbing. Access analysis refers to ‘the process of identifying and mapping the mechanisms by which access is gained, maintained, and controlled’ (Ribot & Peluso, 2003, p. 160). While the struggle for resource access and control is a social and political issue, the ‘nature of its importance, how it is struggled over, and the effects of these struggles are largely products of their times and geographic locations’ (Peluso & Lund, 2011, p. 668). Access has a double edge. Creating regimes of resource access invariably involves the creation of regimes of exclusion, meaning regimes of access are always regimes of access/exclusion. While the term ‘exclusion’ is usually used in a negative sense to convey a sense of inequity or injustice, resource access regimes unavoidably requires some form of exclusion (Hall et al., 2011). Land control and policy, for example, can refer to practices that ‘fix or consolidate forms of access, claiming, and exclusion for some time’ (Peluso & Lund, 2011, p. 668). Moreover, regimes of access/exclusion define legitimate and illegitimate uses and users and make possible economically productive and profitable use within a capitalist development context (Hall et al., 2011). Recent applications of political economy and ecology insights to fisheries access have made important contributions to understanding access dynamics (Campling, Havice, & McCall Howard, 2012; De Alessi, 2012; Havice & Reed, 2012; Mansfield, 2007), but territoriality has received relatively little focused attention in these analyses. This is an important conceptual gap because the history of attempts to define access and exclusion, and identify the institutions governing property, access and exclusion in the sea arguably ‘must be understood as projects associated with territory making and unmaking’ (Campling & Havice, 2014, p. 713).

Territoriality as a strategy of legitimation

For this paper, we understand territoriality in the strategic sense as an ‘attempt by an individual or group to affect, influence, or control people, phenomenon, and relationships by delimiting and asserting control over a geographic area’ (Sack, 1986, p. 19). Sack's concept is a social and human–geographical, rather than biological, understanding of territoriality. Territorialization can be both a claim to the authority to determine who controls resources and a claim to control land and resources (Sikor & Lund, 2009). As a claim over the authority to control what people do within a particular space, territorialization can manifest as a type of state enclosure and expansionism driven by state entities, non-state entities and combinations of both (Brad, Schaffartzik, Pichler, & Plank, 2015; Corson, 2011; Sikor & Lund, 2009; Vandergeest & Peluso, 1995).

The very idea of territory is also an important form of legitimation, whereby people make a claim to a right to a geographical area, such as land (Hall et al., 2011). These ideational dimensions are at the centre of conflicts over who claims legitimate rights to define resource access, uses and redistribution. Territoriality, then, is an example of one mechanism by which access is gained, controlled and maintained (Ribot & Peluso, 2003). Territoriality and territorialization do not exist in isolation of other logics of legitimation. States might claim that they have a right and responsibility to guard, regulate and allocate national resources for the greater good, while people who live on or adjacent to resources might claim to access and govern territories based on ties of belonging and historical dependence (Hall et al., 2011). Claims by local ‘user groups’ are often made on the basis of nationality, ethno-territorial belonging and/or historical use of adjacent resources. Thus, claims based on adjacency are distinct from claims based on historical dependence since people move, but both rationales are often tied together in resource conflicts.

Terraqueous territoriality: community and state conceptions

Ocean and marine resources such as mobile fisheries resources provide an analytical opportunity to move beyond the ‘territorial trap’ (Agnew, 1994; Steinberg, 2001) and away from a related tendency for fixed and grounded material analyses of territoriality and territory to material analyses attentive to fluidity and relationality (Steinberg & Peters, 2015). For example, Steinberg (2001) develops a territorial political economy approach for analyzing the geography of ocean-space, a concept that emphasizes similarities between terrestrial and aquatic realms in the political and social construction of oceans. Building on such insights, Campling and Colás (2017) have recently proposed the term ‘terraqueous territoriality’ to describe the relations between capitalism and the sea whereby capital accumulation ‘seeks to territorialize the sea through forms of sovereignty and modes of appropriation drawn from experiences on land, but in doing so encounters particular tensions thereby generating distinctive spatial effects’ (p. 1).

The terraqueous nature of territoriality in the sea is implicit in fisheries studies and practice. Research on territoriality in fisheries typically focuses either on customary tenure regimes for small-scale fisheries and coastal communities or the nation-state enclosure movement that started in the late 20th century. Territoriality has been at the heart of marine anthropological studies of a variety of historical and contemporary arrangements to control access and exclusion in coastal fisheries (Acheson, 1975; Durrenberger & Pálsson, 1987). Such studies have shown how territoriality in specific contexts is part of larger systems of terrestrial social relations (Durrenberger & Pálsson, 1987). In contemporary fisheries management contexts, territorial use rights fisheries (TURFs) are a common form of rights-based management or spatialized enclosure that create limited-access regimes. These specific forms of enclosures aim to address social justice problems by restricting access to small-scale fisheries and coastal communities adjacent to coastal fisheries (McCay, 2011). A recent study identified over 1000 TURFs in 41 countries around the world (Auriemma, Byler, Peterson, Yurkanin, & Costello, 2014), and various governments and conservation organizations promote the development of TURFs. As institutionalized mechanisms by which different actors can gain, control and maintain access, TURFs can be applied for individuals, communities, social groups or states. Nation-state enclosure, then, constitutes a form of TURF even if in practice states tend to reallocate use rights to private interests for economic purposes.

Nation-state territoriality over fish and other marine resources and spaces was a fundamental factor in the modern state enclosure of the oceans. The origins of modern ‘ocean enclosure’ is often identified with the issuance of the Truman Proclamations of September 1945, which formulated in part as response to a 1937–38 ‘invasion’ of Japanese fishing vessels in American salmon waters in the Bering Sea off Alaska (Finley, 2011; Scheiber & Carr, 1992). Other important factors include the ‘cod wars’ between Iceland and Britain in the post-war period (1952–76) that followed Iceland's multiple unilateral extensions of its fishing territories as a way to exclude primarily British fishing fleets and to protect Icelandic fishing interests (Guðmundsson, 2006) and the US Magnuson–Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (1976). The multiple state moves to extend jurisdiction from the 12 natural mile territorial sea limit to 200 nautical miles – unilaterally by some states following the Second World War and subsequently under the auspices of the United Nations in the 1970s and 1980s – provided coastal states with the authority to exclude foreign fleets from a much larger area of the ocean and, in turn, consolidated control over marine resources previously caught freely by fleets from other countries. Norms emerging from the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) formally and legally established state claims to authority over extended ocean territories, including the notion and ultimate provision of an EEZ as:

an area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea [ … in which] the coastal State has (a) sovereign rights for the purposes of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, of the waters superjacent to the seabed and of the seabed and its subsoil, and with regard to other activities for the economic exploitation and exploration of the zone, such as the production of energy from the water, currents and winds [ … ]. (United Nations, 1982, p. 43)

Despite the creation of EEZs, the distinction between state and community conceptions of terraqueous territoriality is provisional in many contexts. Social and political struggles over fisheries resources within EEZs – resources which are effectively state property – in the decades following the creation of EEZs have resulted in multiple logics and types of state interventions that recognize and formalize customary and new access regimes based on spatial principles. For example, in response to social pressure, direct state allocations to groups of harvesters and community groups adjacent to resources, with constraints on their use and transferability, have helped ensure fisheries resources benefit adjacent social groups, communities and regions (Carothers, 2011; De Alessi, 2012; Eythórsson, 2000). Since the 1980s, some states have also allocated shares of quotas to organized groups of fishers, cooperatives, indigenous groups and other organizations within which decisions about more detailed sub-allocations are made. These provisions have emerged across North America, Europe and New Zealand. Examples include the Alaska Community Development Quota programme for remote indigenous communities and regions (Ginter, 1995; Holland & Ginter, 2001; Mansfield, 2007), community-oriented sector management developed in the last decade in the Northeast United States (McCay, 2011), and certain offshore licences and special allocations in the northern shrimp fishery in Atlantic Canada (Foley et al., 2015). These policies, institutions and relations of access implicitly and sometimes explicitly privilege social groups adjacent to fishing grounds and point to the significance of the relationship between access legitimation and terraqueous territoriality. These social and political dynamics, which exist within EEZs, confirms Steinberg’s (2011) argument that ocean spaces are not static but are instead ‘dynamic spaces whose rules, norms, and geographic divisions are continually reconstituted amidst competing social forces’ (p. 13).

Like coastal fishing community/TURF relations and state/EEZs relations, the claim of adjacency rights by particular interests constitutes a legitimation strategy based on a particularly geographical ontology of land–ocean connections. In the case examined below, the concept of adjacency rights can be understood as clear articulation of terraqueous territoriality, a strategy that social forces use to legitimize access to fluid ocean resources by linking access rights to the spatial proximity of land-based producers and communities. Unlike TURFs and EEZs, however, the case below illustrates how the mobilization of claims of adjacency rights to gain access to marine resources did not necessarily result in the creation of bounded territories per se. Terraqueous territoriality does not, in this sense, imply the creation of territory over mobile marine resources.

TERRITORIALIZATION OF NORTHERN SHRIMP IN CANADA

The following sections examine the role of adjacency as various groups have claimed, gained and lost access to northern shrimp over four decades of fisheries development. The research methods include an extensive literature review, archival research and key informant interviews with over 60 individuals including inshore owner-operators, fish processing plants workers, managers of companies and cooperatives, and government officials. The majority of interviews were part of community-based case studies and fieldwork in rural and remote coastal communities of north-eastern Newfoundland and in coastal Labrador, some of which can only be practically accessed by sea or air.

The geography of northern shrimp

Northern shrimp (Pandalus borealis) is a circumpolar species of coldwater shrimp with fisheries in the Northern Pacific and Northern Atlantic (Figure 1). The bulk of the total global catch has historically been concentrated in Greenland (Denmark) and Canada. In the Northwest Atlantic, current southern physiological and ecological limits extend roughly in the Gulf of Maine and with greatest abundance north from 46°N (off the coast of Nova Scotia) to 75°N (off the coast of Baffin Island) (DFO, 2007).

Figure 1. Geographic distribution of Pandalus borealis. Source: Map adapted from data in (FAO, 2013) by Myron King.

Territorialization through state enclosure

The authority to determine who controls access to northern shrimp resources was fundamentally altered in the late 1970s by the state-led ocean enclosure movement. Before 1977, shrimp resources of the Northwest Atlantic were open access, but access was nevertheless limited by geographical, climatic, physical and technological constraints. During this time, fishing for northern shrimp in the Northwest Atlantic study area – in areas adjacent to Canadian regions of Baffin Island, Labrador and eastern Newfoundland in Canada – was conducted exclusively by Scandinavian fishing companies using large trawler vessels that travelled across the North Atlantic. There was no Canadian history of harvesting shrimp in waters adjacent to Baffin Island, Labrador and eastern Newfoundland before the 1970s, nor sufficient technical capacity for Canadians to engage the northern and subarctic fishery at the time (Foley et al., 2015). The open-access regime for northern shrimp ended, however, with the extension of jurisdictional sovereignty in 1977 out to 200 nautical miles (nm). Significant northern shrimp fishing areas (SFAs), in other words, became property of the Canadian state.

This state territorialization dispossessed Scandinavian interests of their prior formal access to northern shrimp. The government of Canada adopted a series of policies to encourage the domestication or ‘Canadianization’ of the fishery within its waters, with two key policy objectives: to achieve rapid Canadianization of ownership and operation of the offshore fleet; and to create significant off- and onshore employment in coastal regions of Atlantic Canada and the Canadian North (Foley et al., 2015). Territorial enclosure of a previously international fishery was shaped at the outset by development objectives to serve the interests of marginalized adjacent coastal communities.

Conflicting territorial claims: what or who is really adjacent?

In a context when fisheries management authorities in Canada and in other jurisdictions were beginning to implement approaches to restrict access to fisheries for conservation purposes, the Canadian state adopted a limited entry approach for the development of the northern shrimp fishery. The implementation of this approach, however, was shaped by social and political objectives to distribute access amongst sub-national/provincial interests. In early 1978, the Liberal-led government of Canada under Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau announced that it planned to grant a limited number of shrimp fishing licences and invited Canadians to submit applications; it received about 40 applications for offshore shrimp fishing licences (Barrow, Jefferson, Eagles, & Stevens, 2001). Initial licensing policy for the northern shrimp fishery indicated that access would be distributed geographically to interests across different East Coast Canadian provinces. In 1978 and 1979, the DFO issued 12 limited-entry offshore licences to develop a commercial shrimp fishery, with interests in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Quebec sharing a total allowable catch (TAC) quota of 8100 tonnes.

The government of Canada's provincial distribution approach was challenged, however. At the time, the government of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) argued that all offshore licences should be awarded to NL-based fishing interests based on the principle of adjacency, as it considered NL as most directly adjacent to the most abundant SFAs (Vardy & Dunne, 2003, pp. 92–93) and an area where social need was high. When the federal minister responsible for fisheries, Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) Romeo LeBlanc, announced that northern shrimp offshore licences would be allocated across the Atlantic provinces, MPs representing the province of NL protested by invoking the idea of adjacency and contiguousness, with one opposition party MP asking the minister:

I now ask the Minister of Fisheries whether he can explain to the House why he arbitrarily, and with an arrogance which I regret, decided not to award to Newfoundland all of the shrimp licences to the new fishing grounds discovered off the north coast of that province in an area of high unemployment – licences which would mean immediate jobs for Newfoundland. Why did he take some of these licences and award them to other parts of the country where they did not belong? (Oral Questions Session, 1978a)

LeBlanc's response reflects a broader, national conception of implementing adjacency claims:

Mr. Speaker, I am amazed at the hon. member's ignorance of the geography. The fact is that Newfoundland and Labrador did benefit – they got five out of the 11 licences allocated, and it was made clear at the time that if further licences were to be issued priority would be given to areas contiguous to where the fishery is taking place – we took a very cautious approach to this new stock of fish which had been discovered. The hon. member should know that if we start to balkanize the fisheries strictly on provincial grounds it would mean that end of the east coast fishery. (Oral Questions Session, 1978b)

In addition to notions of adjacency, the specific allocations were also shaped by social principles, particularly development needs, and the discretion of the minister. Four additional licences were issued in 1987 to northern Canadian commercial interests in Labrador, Quebec and the indigenous self-governing territory of Nunavut; the final offshore licence was issued in 1991 to Newfoundland interests (DFO, 2007). The government of Canada capped the number of offshore shrimp licences at 17, currently held by 14 Canadian corporate entities, including several indigenous-owned and cooperative owned entities in Quebec and Labrador. Each licence holder, gained access to 1/17th share of the total allowable catch within each SFA (Figure 2). This approach conflicts in some respects with the principle of adjacency since southern interests gained access to SFAs in the far north and northern interests gained access to SFAs in the south, highlighting some of the complexities of how allocation policy evolved in the case. The government of Canada at this time also formalized four guiding principles for the management of the fishery, one of which included ‘fair access to and equitable sharing of the northern shrimp resource by all legitimate Canadian user groups, with particular emphasis on the needs of the people and communities most adjacent to the resource’ (DFO, 1994, p. 3). These early struggles over state allocation reflect the particular challenges of attempting to overcome the land–sea distinction, a key aspect of terraqueous territoriality.

Figure 2. Northern shrimp fishing areas (SFAs). Source: Map adapted from data in (DFO, 2007) by Myron King.

NEW TERRITORIALIZATIONS UNDER SOCIAL–ECOLOGICAL TRANSFORMATION

New claims in a context of collapsed northern cod

The late 1980s and early 1990s marked a period of major social–ecological transformation, which included the infamous collapse of northern cod. Following this incident, social groups previously excluded from shrimp used their proximity to shrimp resources, growing in abundance off NL, to persuade the state to provide shrimp access to interests outside the 17 offshore original licence holders. During the early to mid-1990s, the DFO stock status reports, offshore sector catch rates and information from crew of offshore vessels indicated that northern shrimp stocks were growing rapidly in areas adjacent to southern Labrador and north-east Newfoundland. In this context, the FFAW-Unifor, indigenous interests and processing companies lobbied government to gain access to northern shrimp. This constitutes, arguably, a case of ‘ocean grabbing’ by inshore and indigenous fishing interests over resources that, until then, were exclusively controlled by the generally more industrial and corporate offshore sector.

The role of adjacency in new access and allocations

While the Progressive Conservative-led government of Canada capped offshore licences at 17 in 1991, a subsequent federal government economic assessment of the offshore shrimp fleet concluded that the economic viability of the sector could be maintained at the existing quota levels (an overall quota of 37,600 tonnes). This opened the door for the Minister of the DFO to consider providing access to new interests. Despite opposition from the offshore licence holders, the DFO, responding to pressure to permit new entrants to the fishery, sent out an Atlantic Canada-wide call for industry views and proposals on how to share an increase of northern shrimp quota in 1996. It received almost 160 submissions from individuals, groups, provinces and municipalities across Canada (Noble, 1999, p. 133). In response to the question of what principles should underlie the sharing of the northern shrimp TAC, almost 90% of the 160 submissions recommended adjacency as a significant principle (p. 125). The majority of the proposals indicated that the quota increase should be allocated to the inshore fleets (Noble, 1999) that were devastated by the collapse of cod and other groundfish. Claims based on the idea of adjacency, in other words, were integrated with claims based on social development principles.

In this context, the Canadian Minister of Fisheries and Oceans announced a 57% increase in the TAC of northern shrimp on 23 April 1997. Much of the increased access was for areas accessible to smaller vessels off Newfoundland and Labrador. The minister announced that adjacency to the resource would be a ‘guiding principle’ in new allocations. As part of the 1997–99 management plan, the minister granted much of the increase to the NL-based inshore fleet. While most of the additional quota was granted to the inshore fleet, the minister also granted ‘a special allocation of 3,000 tonnes for the northern part of the Great Northern Peninsula, which takes in communities from Big Brook to Goose Cove’ (SABRI, 2017). This is an area not only adjacent to growing shrimp resources but also one that has been hit particularly hard by the groundfish collapses. Demonstrating the significance of adjacency, the organization established to manage the special allocation is called St. Anthony Basin Resources Inc. (SABRI), referring to the ocean basin then rich in shrimp directly adjacent to St. Anthony and the small region for which the allocations was designated.

New beneficiaries, new mechanisms of access

The Canadian state's response to social demands for access resulted in new mechanisms and agents of access in the northern shrimp fishery. Offshore licences were no longer the only formal mechanism through which the government of Canada authorized access to northern shrimp. Two new mechanisms evolved consisting of inshore permits/licences for inshore fishers and special allocations, whereby an allocation holder is permitted to contract licence holders who own vessels to catch shrimp in return for benefits such as royalties. With a precedent set for new entrants, and in a context of a growing resource, other groups sought to stake a claim to northern shrimp. For example, anticipating further quota increases, in 1998, the Fogo Island Co-operative Society Ltd (herein Fogo Island Co-op), which is based directly adjacent to SFA 6, lobbied for an allocation of shrimp similar to the one managed by SABRI. Fogo Island Co-op leaders decided they would fight for a special allocation of shrimp by emphasizing ‘their rights of adjacency’ and historical dependence on fisheries and its role in community development (Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, 1998). Between 1997 and 2003, over 300 NL-based owner-operators, several geographically defined groups of inshore cod-affected fishers in NL, and a range of special allocation holders including SABRI, the Fogo Island Co-op, and several indigenous groups and governments within and outside NL capitalized on a receptive state to ‘grab’ or access northern shrimp resources.

Indigenous groups, including the Innu, Nunatsiavut government, Labrador Métis Nation and the Conne River First Nation, along with additional special allocations to Makivik Corporation and Nunavut interests, gained and legitimized access through adjacency claims and post-colonial processes of restitution. The signing of land claims agreements, namely the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act (1993), Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement Act/Nunatsiavut Claims Agreement (2005) and Nunavik Inuit Land Claims Agreement Act (2007), played an important role in legitimizing Indigenous access to northern shrimp. While DFO fisheries management frameworks are the formal means through which access is granted, new agreements between the Canadian state and indigenous groups have incorporated principles and frameworks for granting access to fish resources. For example, the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement Act, signed in 2005 and later amended to the Nunatsiavut Claims Agreement when the Labrador Inuit Association ceased to exist, granted access and management control to Labrador Inuit populations residing in historically adjacent and dependent areas to natural resources, including fisheries for various species. With regards to northern shrimp, the Act states:

If in any calendar year after the Effective Date the Minister decides to issue more Commercial Fishing Licences to fish for shrimp in Waters Adjacent to the Zone than the number available for issuance in the year of the Agreement, the Minister shall offer access to the Nunatsiavut Government through an additional Commercial Fishing Licence issued to the Nunatsiavut Government or by some other means to 11 percent of the quantity available to be Harvested under those licences. (Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement, 2005, p. 213)

These developments illustrate how the terraqueous territoriality notion of adjacency rights is institutionalized in multiple arenas and for the benefit of different interests.

TERRAQUEOUS TERRITORIALITY IN AN ERA OF DECLINE

Contesting principles of dispossession: the LIFO policy

After three decades of increases in total allowable catches and expanded allocations to various private organizations and groups, the government of Canada began reducing shrimp quotas in 2010 in response to declining resource abundance. Whereas principles of geographical adjacency and associated social principles linked to the development needs and aspirations of adjacent communities were institutionalized in the state's allocation regime from 1977 to 2003, the government of Canada initially adopted a more technocratic method for decisions to reduce allocations. It decided initially to implement reductions in total allowable catch by using a single policy tool based on the ‘last in first out’ (LIFO) principle, which means that, in the case of a resource decline, access is withdrawn in reverse order from the date of initial access. The LIFO principle was justified on two accounts: first, to protect the ‘viability of the existing [17 offshore licence holder] enterprises’; and second, to avoid ‘permanent increase in harvesting capacity’ by making new entrants’ participation temporary (Ernst & Young, 2012). However, LIFO did not appear in policy documents until 2003 (Ernst & Young, 2012) and its legitimacy was called into question by some industry interests and subnational provincial governments.

The application of LIFO, combined with the general decline of the fishery, led to a crisis in the legitimacy of state decision-making around resource withdrawal. The application of the LIFO policy prompted a federal government review of allocation decisions before the 2012 fishing season following several cuts, including the reduction of 9000 tonnes of quota in 2011 compared with 2010 in key areas adjacent to NL. The LIFO policy also led to the complete removal of two special allocations held by the Labrador Innu and the Fogo Island Co-operative Society Ltd. Subsequent assessments by the government of NL and the FFAW-Unifor union that represents the interests of inshore fish harvesters and processing plant workers in NL who entered the fishery in the late 1990s identified negative economic impacts of existing and potential shrimp quota reductions. The identified impacts included displacement of inshore owner-operator enterprises, loss of at least five of the remaining 10 shrimp processing plants in NL, the unemployment of several hundred crew and plant workers, and broader economic and social impacts in more than 100, mostly small, communities where inshore harvesters and processing plant workers reside (DFA, 2015; Keenan & Carruthers, 2015).

Contested adjacency in claims and counterclaims

The adjacency principle emerged at the centre of diverging efforts to challenge and support the use of the LIFO policy as the basis on which to withdraw access from different interests engaged in the northern shrimp fishery. While resource decline will inevitably create less security in resource access and benefits for everyone in the northern shrimp industry, the LIFO policy protected the access of early entrants (primarily, the offshore licence holders) and made the access of newer entrants (inshore sector licence holders, primarily in NL, and special allocation holders) more vulnerable to dispossession. In a study of the socioeconomic benefits of shrimp fishery conducted by the FFAW-Unifor union, subtitled ‘The importance of maintaining adjacency in allocation decisions’, Keenan and Carruthers (2015) argued that:

DFO's LIFO approach to northern shrimp allocation does not value adjacency and the offshore fleet provides limited economic benefits to adjacent communities. [ … ] Shrimp fishing area (SFA) 6 is directly adjacent to Newfoundland and southern Labrador. It is the primary fishing area for the northern shrimp fleet, accounting for the vast majority of the inshore allocation. It is also the traditional fishing grounds that were used to fish cod, turbot, and other groundfish. (p. 3)

In the face of reduced allocations, the FFAW-Unifor called for exclusive inshore sector access to SFA 6, which encompassed much of the EEZ adjacent to north-east NL where most inshore fishing occurred. This claim for a form of territorial exclusivity – and to exclude the offshore licence holders from the area – was made largely by invoking the principle of adjacency. The inshore sector was not, however, alone in claiming access to the diminished northern shrimp stocks based on the concept of adjacency. Offshore licence holders also invoked the idea of adjacency and development benefits to protect their access. The Canadian Association of Prawn Producers (CAPP), an industry organization representing about half the offshore shrimp licence holders, argued that the LIFO policy is a fair and equitable approach based on adjacency. ‘We’re adjacent too,’ it claimed (CAPP, n.d.), while identifying the employment benefits of the offshore sector for rural and remote coastal communities in NL.

While the intra-industry struggle over access to northern shrimp gained much publicity as a struggle between off- and inshore interests, indigenous groups also claimed injustice in allocations. For example, the Inuit of Nunatsiavut, a self-governing area in northern Labrador directly adjacent to significant SFAs, claimed that the government of Canada failed to meet land claim obligations when the shrimp fishery is considered. These claims of inequity were also communicated to the federal minister by the Torngat Joint Fisheries Board, a co-management body established by the land claim agreement to provide recommendations to the minister. Indigenous organizations and individuals we interviewed consistently invoked both the adjacency principle and recent land claim obligations that establish the means to increase indigenous participation in fisheries in and adjacent to their newly controlled land and sea territories:

We really have to struggle to get any increases at all in the Northwest Atlantic. I think the problem is the Northwest Atlantic is such a […] it seems like everybody has an interest there. You look at the 17 license holders […] it's a Canadian resource. DFO, they can make a wrong decision because they allocate to Canadians, but it's adjacent to Northern Labrador, and we should get more of the pie [ … ] if you look at the northern shrimp fishery geographically, it's located by majority adjacent to northern Labrador, and everybody shares in it, which seems to be a common problem for Labrador, not just shrimp. If you look at hydro power, if you look at nickel – I mean, the amount of stuff that comes out of Labrador and that we benefit very little from is astounding, you know, and this is just another example of it, in my mind, anyway. (interview 0019)

DISCUSSION

We conclude by reflecting on: (1) how adjacency as an assertion of terraqueous territoriality can shape, and be shaped by, social goals of equity in access, distribution of benefits, and development challenges of rural and remote communities; (2) how ecological conditions fundamentally influence the ability of social groups to use territoriality effectively to secure resource access; and (3) calling for further research on how marginalized groups can use territorial claims for dispersed resources under conditions of ocean grabbing and climate change.

Social dimensions: adjacency as an assertion of territoriality

Ecological enclosures, resource grabs and territorializations are often treated as state- or corporate-driven processes developed to serve corporate profit. We join other studies that argue enclosure and territorialization can be motivated by a broader range of goals (Hall et al., 2011). In the case examined above, the terraqueous territoriality of adjacency rights was institutionalized in the Canadian state to support the development interests of marginalized social groups including the interests of small-scale owner-operators/petty capital, fishing labour, processing labour, and vulnerable fishing dependent rural and remote coastal communities. The idea of adjacency was not the only factor influencing the ability of groups to gain access, however. A number of other factors enabled some marginalized social groups to gain access to resource benefits, including organizational capacity and political leaders willing to support the interests of small-scale fisheries and coastal communities (Foley et al., 2015). The case, therefore, supports the suggestion that the state's responsiveness to fishing user groups/interests and institutions is crucial to the state's maintenance of legitimacy, but a result is that state involvement in regulating natural resource sectors becomes variegated and differentiated (Bavinck, 2003). In the case of northern shrimp under Canadian jurisdiction, a similar patchwork of principles, policies and commitments affects the allocation regime and the role of adjacency in it.

In the sea – as on land – access and property relations are continuously negotiated by state and subnational actors resulting in adjustments and transformations in property and access relations (Campling & Havice, 2014; Lund, 2009; Steinberg, 2011). As northern shrimp entered phases of resource expansion and contraction, the patchwork of allocation principles and varied interests came into tension. Different groups argued their access was consistent with principles such as adjacency, historical attachment/dependence (on shrimp for the offshore sector; on adjacent fisheries more generally for the inshore), and economic and social development for rural and remote communities. Moreover, as in other cases of contested territorialities, territorial claims are met with counterclaims among interests, including struggles over material resources and ideological conflicts over the sustainability of certain types of resource production (Corson, 2011). In the northern shrimp fishery, different industry segments sought to defend their access by arguing that their particular type of production and development relations, technologies and practices were more appropriate. Portions of the more corporate, offshore sector claimed it provided a viable year-round fishery, with full-time year round employment based on an economic development and investment model supporting full-year, consistent access to and supply of resources. Organized interests in the inshore sector such as the FFAW-Unifor union, however, claimed that the year-round method of the offshore sector is ecologically destructive and socially regressive relative to the inshore sector's contribution to remote coastal communities. At the same time, some indigenous groups argued that an effective and equitable application of the principle of adjacency would require the state to allocate a greater share of shrimp resources to their people.

Ecology and territoriality

The peculiarity of the ecological conditions of production in fisheries results in unique problems of access relations (Campling & Havice, 2014). Terraqueous territoriality claims of adjacency rights are likely to be more successful and less contentious where marine resources are relatively sedentary or where the location of more mobile resources is predictable such as in oysters, mussels, seaweeds and lobster (McCay, 1978; Panayotou, 1984). Territoriality may be completely absent in more expansive open-sea fisheries that pursue highly dispersed and/or mobile resources where the defence of exclusive rights may be more difficult. Moreover, applying terraqueous territoriality in situations where there are multiple claims and no clear common interest is more likely to reflect, or result in, more contentious political struggles. This has been recognized in the history of the policy application of the adjacency principle in Canada. While adjacency plays a dominant role in the lobster fishery in Canada, it plays no apparent role in the tuna fishery pursued well offshore (DFO, 2002). However, the northern shrimp fishery demonstrates how adjacency can play a role in offshore fisheries with more ambiguous boundaries. Although clearly defined boundaries are an important condition for TURFs (McCay et al., 2014), the case of northern shrimp highlights how adjacency can serve as an assertion of territoriality with less clearly defined boundaries. Unlike TURFs, which typically are located near-shore, multiple groups gained access to exclusive portions or catch shares within geographically large shrimp fishing zones. While organized labour representing the inshore sector in NL sought to gain exclusive access to a major shrimp fishing zone adjacent to NL, which would effectively create a TURF, northern shrimp fishing zones have had multiple interests accessing quotas and allocations in shared access areas. The key point is that the distinctive resource and management geography and political ecology of northern shrimp created conditions for contested territorial claims that are as yet unsettled.

Extending adjacency rights to resources that are hundreds of kilometres from the shores where people live is generally more challenging than linking near-shore fish resources to communities within a few kilometres. Since the practical implications of adjacency are difficult to define and are vulnerable to contestation, the institutionalization of adjacency as a principle of allocation in fact enhanced possibilities for new interests to gain access during a period of social–ecological transformation. When shrimp populations grew substantially in areas adjacent to inshore interests and fishery-dependent communities of Newfoundland and Labrador that were devastated by the historic collapse of cod, organized labour, community groups and political allies succeeded in securing new mechanisms (i.e., inshore permits/licences and special allocations) of access to northern shrimp. This resource ‘grab’ in large part depended on successfully mobilizing the idea of adjacency to legitimize their claims over a resource previously caught exclusively by capital-intensive offshore industrial trawlers. While the Canadian state's decisions over access were relatively less contested in periods of expansion, in a period of contraction, competing claims to adjacency rights became more visible through the mobilization of distinct claims to access based on adjacency, historical use and competing visions of production and development (year-round offshore industrial versus seasonal inshore/community based and semi-industrial). Contested terraqueous territorialities were, therefore, shaped by other ideas of legitimation, highlighting complex and multifaceted underlying conflicts about moral economies of access, property, production and development. The current period of contraction has magnified the ethical challenges of the state's role in mediating conflicting claims to adjacency rights in a geographically expansive fishery with geographically dispersed and socially differentiated interest groups.

CONCLUSIONS

While ‘struggles over property are as much about the scope and constitution of authority as they are about access to resources’ (Sikor & Lund, 2009, p. 19), we might also argue that ocean grabbing is as much about influencing state authority as it is about grabbing resources. The introduction of this paper implied that it is problematic to assume that ocean grabbing is inherently state or corporate driven. Such an approach obscures the social struggles and social movements in which marginalized groups engage to access, and indeed ‘grab’, state-controlled coastal resources. It is more analytically and politically fruitful, it is suggested here, to open our analytical horizon to alternative forms of ocean grabbing and alternative access relations and strategies, including forms based on moral and ethical principles of distribution and development. Drawing on a political ecology access analysis and a case study of northern shrimp within Canadian jurisdiction, the paper examined how different social groups positioned themselves to claim access to state property by mobilizing the terraqueous territoriality of adjacency rights – the idea that people living near or in the proximity of resources ought to gain access and benefits.

While Campling and Colás (2017) use terraqueous territoriality to describe the agency of states and large capital in the development of EEZs, ‘flags of convenience’ regimes and multilateral counter-piracy initiatives, this paper suggests that marginalized agents such as small-scale producers, fishing communities and indigenous groups also engage in terraqueous territoriality. They do this through the mobilization of the idea of adjacency rights. The way in which accumulation strategies shape, and are shaped by the geographical proximity of fishing and landing ports and onshore processing facilities to major offshore fishing locations illustrate the terraqueous nature of fisheries as constitutive of complex interactions among more and less geographically mobile social and natural forces.

The research raises important questions about how resource access regimes will be influenced and reshaped by global climate change processes. Climate change is causing long-term shifts in species distribution, abundance and catch potential that will pose challenges for fisheries management agencies, national political economies, producers and coastal communities (Allison et al., 2009). The dramatic changes in shrimp distribution and abundance over four decades of growth and, currently, contraction provide insight into the types of dynamics that might result from intensified climactic and oceanic change. The allocation principles institutionalized for resource development in Canada's northern shrimp fishery were designed to address the problem of distributing access to northern shrimp to new actors and interests over three decades of fisheries development. These principles were mainly envisioned for conditions of resource growth, including the rapid growth of shrimp in areas where previously little shrimp fishing occurred. These institutions were not well prepared to decide how to withdraw resources from different industry participants in a context of resource decline. Dramatic changes in the abundance and geographical distribution of marine species undermined the spatially contingent adjacency claims of some groups and created opportunities for other interests to make claims over resources as the location and relative abundance of resources changed. If McCay (2011) is right in suggesting that ‘in the future, fisheries management may see increased interest in more spatially discrete and place-based management controls even for more dispersed, mobile and migratory marine fish’ (p. 243), social scientists, practitioners and activists ought to take seriously the unique theoretical and practical challenges of terraqueous territoriality beyond more near-shore sedentary fishery contexts. This analysis, thus, points towards the need for further research into the role of territoriality in future struggles over marine living organisms under conditions of climate, oceanic and political economic change.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank Katy Seto and Nathan Bennett for organizing panels at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers, where a draft of this paper was first presented. They also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the Harris Centre at Memorial University, the FFAW-Unifor, the government of Nunatsiavut, the Torngat Joint Fisheries Board, Marc Allain, Barbara Neis, and interview participants for their support of this research, Dinah Okyere for research assistance, Myron King for creating the maps, and Derek Hall, two anonymous reviewers, and the editors for constructive feedback on earlier drafts. Any errors are the authors’ own.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Paul Foley http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8012-0173

Charles Mather https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0245-5247

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Memorial University's Leslie Harris Centre of Regional Policy and Development: Applied Research Fund.