The Cyborgization of the Fisheries : on Attempts to Make Fisheries Management Possible

Abstract

Although natural resource exploitation has a long tradition, modern resource management is a more recent phenomenon. The huge variety in natural resource exploitation has made it difficult to place the industrial harvesting of marine living resources under political and managerial control. For most of history fish and fishing people have for all practical purposes been unmanageable. From the late 1960s, when it became apparent that important fisheries resources were about to be overexploited by industrial technologies, the process to transform fish, fishing people and fishing technologies to make them manageable has intensified. The management process contributes to an organizational change in the fisheries in which cybernetic forms of organization create complex and heterogeneous networks linking together nature, society, technology, science, markets, and policy in new ways. With Actor-Network Theory (ant) and the history of industrial commercial fisheries in Norway, Canada and worldwide as points of departure, this article outlines a theoretical framework for the study of how natural and social entities are transformed and linked together to become modern fisheries resource management.