Private Oceans

‘This comprehensive analysis explores the linkages between the failure of late capitalism and the rise of neoliberalism in four countries’ fisheries. Wonderfully combining political ecology and economy, McCormack’s anthropological gaze also illuminates how resistance often followed neoliberal attempts to shape local cultural understandings of fishing and oceans’ – Evelyn Pinkerton, School of Resource and Environmental Management, Simon Fraser University‘Essential reading … an outstanding scholarly critique of a governance panacea paradigm, which consists of closing access to the marine commons, and the complex and transformative social impacts associated with the introduction of private property rights into coastal communities, and the handling of marketised fish quotas to a privileged few’ – Niels Einarsson, Director of the Stefansson Arctic Institute, Akureyri, Iceland‘Provides an illuminating critique of the destruction wrought on precarious fishing communities and endangered fish species by the neoliberalisation of the oceans’ – Jon Altman, Research Professor, Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Melbourne and Emeritus Professor in Anthropology, at The Australian National University Canberra

Fiona McCormack is Senior Lecturer and Convenor of Anthropology at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. She is author of Private Oceans (Pluto, 2017), co-editor of Engaging with Capitalism (Emerald Group Publishing, 2013) and a contributor to Anthropologies of Value (Pluto, 2016).