v
Foreword
Around four decades ago professionals working on fi sheries problems generally
agreed there was a crisis in the world’s fi sheries. The world’s fi sh catch had leveled
off, many formerly productive fi sheries were badly depleted, and a few had utterly
collapsed. Since then some progress has been made, but the overall trend worldwide
has continued downward. True, the world’s total fi sh supply increased over this
time, but that was mainly a result of increased targeting of smaller species further
down the marine food web, and also the phenomenal growth of aquaculture. Indeed,
aquaculture contributed only around 3% of the world’s fi sh supply four decades
ago, but now contributes almost 40% – and now raises environmental concerns that
were only dimly anticipated before its phenomenal surge.
Over the past years several theoretical approaches have been proposed for analyzing and alleviating this crisis, but perhaps none have proposed a theoretical
framework as holistic and promising as the one in this ambitious book, which urges
that fi sheries and aquaculture systems be viewed through the lens of governability ,
or their capacity for governance.
The present volume is a follow-up to the authors’ earlier book, Fish for Life
(2005), which only raised the topic of governability in its concluding chapters. It
precedes a planned third volume that will explore methods for applying governability theory in real-world situations.
The core authors here have been collaborating on the theoretical development of
the governability concept for more than a decade, and this volume represents the
fruition of their many formal discussions, meetings, workshops, research, and
scholarly work. And now joined by more than a dozen additional authors, here
presented is a rich diversity of intellectual, philosophical, theoretical, and methodological insights, as well as case studies that explore these insights in six different
culture regions.
For assessing a particular system’s capacity for governance, the authors urge
beginning by conceptually deconstructing the system into three sub-systems: the
system to be governed, the governing system, and the governing interactions between
these two. Then, with each part’s components and dynamics richly illuminated, they
Foreword
Around four decades ago professionals working on fi sheries problems generally
agreed there was a crisis in the world’s fi sheries. The world’s fi sh catch had leveled
off, many formerly productive fi sheries were badly depleted, and a few had utterly
collapsed. Since then some progress has been made, but the overall trend worldwide
has continued downward. True, the world’s total fi sh supply increased over this
time, but that was mainly a result of increased targeting of smaller species further
down the marine food web, and also the phenomenal growth of aquaculture. Indeed,
aquaculture contributed only around 3% of the world’s fi sh supply four decades
ago, but now contributes almost 40% – and now raises environmental concerns that
were only dimly anticipated before its phenomenal surge.
Over the past years several theoretical approaches have been proposed for analyzing and alleviating this crisis, but perhaps none have proposed a theoretical
framework as holistic and promising as the one in this ambitious book, which urges
that fi sheries and aquaculture systems be viewed through the lens of governability ,
or their capacity for governance.
The present volume is a follow-up to the authors’ earlier book, Fish for Life
(2005), which only raised the topic of governability in its concluding chapters. It
precedes a planned third volume that will explore methods for applying governability theory in real-world situations.
The core authors here have been collaborating on the theoretical development of
the governability concept for more than a decade, and this volume represents the
fruition of their many formal discussions, meetings, workshops, research, and
scholarly work. And now joined by more than a dozen additional authors, here
presented is a rich diversity of intellectual, philosophical, theoretical, and methodological insights, as well as case studies that explore these insights in six different
culture regions.
For assessing a particular system’s capacity for governance, the authors urge
beginning by conceptually deconstructing the system into three sub-systems: the
system to be governed, the governing system, and the governing interactions between
these two. Then, with each part’s components and dynamics richly illuminated, they