Private Oceans: The Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas

As the era of thriving small-scale fishing communities continues to wane, Fiona McCormack opens a window into contemporary fisheries quota systems and explores how neoliberalism has become entangled with our approach to environmental management. Grounded in fieldwork and participant observation in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland, and Hawaii, Private Oceans offers a comparative analysis of the processes of privatization in ecosystem services and traces how value has been repositioned in the market away from productive activities, ultimately causing broad collapse of fishing communities worldwide.