Johnsen, Jahn Petter

Fisheries management, fisheries organisation and fisherires development

"NETWORKS OR MARKETS: THE RECRUITMENT CHALLENGE IN FISHERIES"

Summary
The radical changes that happen in coastal communities and industries;the processes of structuration, mechanisation, and increased governance, which we call cyborgisation processes, seem to have had consequences for the employment systems in marine communities. However, very little is known about these changes. Both the marine industries, and particularly the fisheries, and the authorities assume that either the
traditional employment systems or the market forces will secure recruitment to the marine sector in the future.The main question in this project is: How and through which processes are fishers and labour recruited today and what is the role of and relation between local networks, market mechanisms, and the communities in the
contemporary employment systems in the marine sector? The question is addressed through a study deploying social capital theory, actor-network theory, and quantitative
and qualitative methods in three partly overlapping work packages.
Funding: Norwegian Research Council and the Fisheries- and Aquaculture Research Fund

Participants: Phd-student Signe A. Sønvisen

 Eearlier

"HOW OBJECTS BECOME MANAGEABLE - THE CYBORG FISH AND THE MANAGEMENT OF COD IN CANADA, NORWAY, AND THE EUROPEAN UNION"

Summary
Although natural resources have been exploited since the beginning of humanity, modern resource management is a recent phenomenon. The huge variety in type of resources, adaptations, knowledge systems, institutions, and practices in natural resources exploitation have made it difficult to get the harvest of common property or free-for-all-resources under political and managerial control. The fish as well as the fishers were for all practical purposes unmanageable. From the late 1960s, when it became apparent that important fisheries resources were about to be overexploited, the process to transform fish, people and technologies so as to make them manageable was intensified. The outcome of this process, of which the cyborg fish is a metaphor, is a complex and heterogeneous network linking together nature, society, technology, science, markets, and policy in new ways. The robo fishers, killing machines, cyborg fish and other creatures are calculated by different methods, metered out in a variety of units, and used for the regulation of a wide range of processes and at different stages of such processes. These cyborgs link together a wide range of practices, be they scientific, political, cultural, or technological. They are constituted by and constitute resource management, the Fishing Leviathan.

Funding: Norwegian Research Council. partners: Centre for Rural Research, Norwegian College of Fisheries Science, Norwegian Institute of Fisheries and Aquaculture, Memorial University of Newfoundland. Completed 2009.

Other contact persons:
Petter Holm
Peter S. Sinclair

The Cyborg Fish Homepage

"IS THE ARCTIC HUMAN ENVIRONMENT MOVING TO A NEW STATE?"
International Polar Year project
Funding: National Science Foundation, USA. Completed 2008.
More on the Marema homepage:Marema

Recent articles 

Jahn Petter Johnsen, Petter Holm, Peter Sinclair, Dean BavingtonThe cyborgization of the fisheries: On Attempts to Make Fisheries Management Possible MAST. 2009. 7. nr 2

Peter R. Sinclair, Jahn Petter Johnsen, Paul Ripley Power and the production of science: Assessing Cod Stocks as the Mechanistic Fishery Collapses MAST. 2009. 7. nr 2

Jahn Petter Johnsen, Grant D. Murray, Barbara Neis North atlantic fisheries in change: From Organic Associations to Cybernetic Organizations MAST. 2009. 7. nr 2

Murray, G.D., B.Neis, and J.P.Johnsen. Lessons Learned from Reconstructing Interactions between Local Ecological Knowledge, Fisheries Science and Fisheries Management in the Commercial Fisheries of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. Human Ecology 2006.

Johnsen, J. P. 2005. The evolution of the "harvest machinery": why capture capacity has continued to expand in Norwegian fisheries Marine Policy vol. 29, 6: 481-493