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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the function of an Indigenous commercial fishery at Norway House Cree Nation as a social enterprise, and to examine its potential to enhance community economic development.

The research was conducted in three phases, and the outcome of each phase was used as an input for the next phase. In the first phase, questionnaire surveys were administered among commercial fishing households. In the second phase, semi-structured interviews were conducted with key informants, and in the third, with fisheries experts, food development experts and government officials.

Norway House Fisherman’s Co-op functions as a social enterprise mainly because commercial fishers contribute to local food security by sharing fish, and the Co-op operates additional businesses which contribute to job creation and community economic development.

The study was carried out in only one community and commercial fishery from northern Manitoba, and the results will not be directly applicable elsewhere.

This research provides recommendations for further development of commercial fisheries at Norway House: fuller use of existing fish resources, value-added economic development and creative use of regulatory options.

The Co-op is identified as the engine of community development. It functions well, but there are additional opportunities for development, such as reducing the discard of lower value fish, which is consistent with indigenous Cree cultural values of not wasting resources.

Livelihood preference for children is anchored in the aspiration of parents for a better life for them with due consideration of their capacities given available resources and opportunities from inside and outside the community. Given the data from an earlier survey I conducted, this chapter examines the fisheries management issues as contexts and the time factors that may have influenced the livelihood preference for children of parents, primarily fathers. Twenty-five percent of parents or 30 out of the 120 non-probability samples of municipal fishing families surveyed in South Negros in the Philippines preferred fishing for their children. For a comparative analysis, 30 parents were also randomly drawn from the remaining samples who preferred other livelihoods for their children away from fishing. As a male-dominated industry, evident in the fishing history of families, the tradition may have already declined among most parents as non-fishing livelihoods were perceived to offer family resilience to ecological and socioeconomic changes. The projected decrease in new families engaged in fishing would also mean a pressure reduction on municipal fisheries; thus, opportunities for non-fishing livelihoods must be accessible through full scholarships for college or technical-vocational education. Meanwhile, basic education sciences should infuse lessons in responsible or right fishing practices to expose children to sustainable fisheries at a young age if they pursue fishing livelihoods when they become adults.

Purpose – To critically assess engagements with capitalism in coastal fisheries development, considering their success or otherwise for coastal villagers.Approach – Using field research and written reports of projects and the concept of “social embeddedness” we analyze two fisheries development projects as local instances of capitalism.Findings – Coastal peoples in the Pacific have been selling marine products for cash since the earliest days of contact with both Europeans and Asians. Since the 1970s, there have also been fisheries development projects. Both types of engagement with capitalism have had problems with commercial viability and ecological sustainability. One way to understand these issues is to view global capitalist markets as penetrating into localities through the lens of local cultures. We find, however, that local cultures are only one factor among several needed to explain the outcomes of these instances of capitalism. Other explanations include nature, national political and economic contexts, and transnational development assistance frameworks. The defining features of “local capitalisms” thus arise from configurations of human and nonhuman, local and outside influences.Social implications – Development project design should account for local conditions including: (1) village-based socioeconomic approaches, (2) national political economic contexts, (3) frameworks that donors bring to projects, and (4) (in)effective resource management.Originality/value of paper – The chapter builds on the experience of the authors over 15 years across multiple projects. The analysis provides a framework for understanding problems people have encountered in trying to get what they want from capitalism, and is applicable outside the fisheries sector.

Agricultural and fishery disasters are rather obscure emergency management research topics. However, the Food and Agriculture Sector is one of only 16 critical infrastructure sectors included in the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, and the sector is a vital component of the United States economy. As climate change continues to increase the frequency and severity of agricultural and fishery disasters, the Food and Agricultural Sector must adapt to and cope with unprecedented levels of risk. This chapter provides an overview of federal agricultural and fishery disaster policy and explores whether such policies are consistent with Jerroleman’s (2019)principles of just recovery.

Purpose – This chapter focuses on ways urban – and other non-local – pressures have influenced a rural archipelago area by studying changes in fisheries-related livelihoods, use of natural resources and regulatory regimes.

Design/methodology/approach – The material for this chapter comprises mainly of structured and semi-structured interviews with fishers and other stakeholders in the Archipelago Sea and in the Åland Islands, SW Finland. A governance approach is used, taking into account the interactive social, economic and ecological systems embedded in institutions, social networks and cultures.

Findings – The economic importance of traditional fishing livelihood has diminished, but fishing still holds a strong position in the culture and life mode of the local people in the studied archipelago areas. In families selling fish, this income stands typically for a part of the household income and especially wage work has become an important income source in the pluriactivity. Providing services for the tourists and summer cottage dwellers is a potentially growing source of livelihood. The increased recreational use of the Finnish Archipelago Sea has changed the ownership structure of the land area, mostly due to the popular summer cottage dwelling. New public fishing rights for (often urban) recreational fishers have narrowed the scope of the local decision-making and aroused resistance among the local archipelago people.

Originality/value – Rural–urban relations and governance aspects have been rarely studied in relation to the use of natural resources. This chapter gives new insights into the multifaceted roles of new urban influences in rural settings.

In 1950, the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan) was given a perpetual water license for a large section of Northern British Columbia, Canada. The benefit to the original owner of the water rights, the Province of British Columbia, was economic and population growth. The purpose of this paper is to follow the contestation over these rights from 1948 to 2016.

An institutional logics perspective was taken to analyze the main actors and how their relative power (dominant versus fringe) changed in the institutional field. Archival data and selected interviews were mapped to institutional logics across three time periods.

In the inter-temporal setting, many of the actors that were fringe in 1950 became more dominant by 2016. For example, the local indigenous peoples, the Cheslatta Carrier First Nation, were flooded off their land to make way for Alcan’s dam. They ended up as very powerful players in the institutional field. The perpetual rights given to Alcan made it a dominant actor across all time periods, despite changes in the logics of the institutional field.

A single case was studied; other comparative settings should be explored to contrast and compare. The data were primarily archival, supplemented by only three interviews of those related to the case study. This case study is also one where water rights were privatized in perpetuity, which may not be the case in other settings.

Current governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) should use this case to understand the long-term effects of resource policy decisions.

The building of large dams has been, and continues to be, used worldwide to provide power to create economic growth. Our setting provides insight into the long-term societal outcomes of using water rights in this way.

This is an original use of institutional logics around a natural resource-based institutional field. Using institutional logics in a multi-period setting, focusing on the power relations of the key actors, and how they can be constrained by historical forces, provides a contribution to the literature.

The difference between the highly successful Maine lobster industry and the crisis-ridden New England ground fishery is that the lobster industry has been able to organize politically to get legislation to solve a number of communal action dilemmas. The groundfishery has not been able to do so. What has made the difference is the lobster industry's development of a conservation ethic over the past 70 years, as additional conservation laws, increasing catches, and ideational factors reinforced each other in an upward spiral. In the groundfishery, top down management policies, biology, and technology all worked against developing effective rules, which led to cheating, a “gold rush mentality” and overexploitation.

Purpose – The authors introduce the chapters of Engaging with Capitalism with a discussion of anthropological and other social theory about peoples’ approaches to capitalism, especially peoples with vibrant noncapitalist social systems, such as are found in Oceania.Approach – The introduction is in the form of a review of anthropological and other social theory about interactions between capitalism and noncapitalist social systems.Findings – The theoretical literature has tended to dichotomize capitalist and noncapitalist societies. While heuristically it is useful to contrast capitalist and noncapitalist social systems, in practice once societies come into the orbit of capitalism people adapt elements of capitalism to suit their aims. Furthermore, societies generally considered thoroughly capitalist also include noncapitalist features. So it is more accurate to think of societies as involving a mix of capitalism and noncapitalism, and the nature of that mix is part of what makes each society distinct.Social implications – The theoretical dichotomization of societies as capitalist or not, with capitalism understood as being universal, and noncapitalism understood in general terms such as gift economy, is prevalent in public imaginaries. Domestic social policy and international development assistance are often based on this dualistic understanding. Such programs could work better if they were based instead on an understanding that each group of people has a dynamic economic system, which includes capitalist and noncapitalist elements that interact in ways influenced by their history and locality.Value of paper – The chapter provides a conceptual scaffold for thinking about the ways people engage with capitalism.

What an odd kind of specialist a marine librarian is. A normal specialist, if there is such a creature, has been defined as a man who knows more and more about less and less, until eventually he knows everything about nothing. But a marine librarian is not a normal specialist.