Transnational certification and ecolabeling programs have become an important new site of environmental governance, as well as an emerging arena for action and conflict in international trade. This paper explores the implementation of Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification in salmon fisheries in the US state of Alaska in the early 2000s, the growing opposition within the industry to MSC certification through periods of reassessment, and the emergence of an alternative Alaska certification initiative in 2011. It suggests that these shifts were rooted in struggles over understudied third-party certification and labeling processes that we conceptualize as marketized governance. The paper further shows how certification and labeling can obscure and expose competing industry interests and power relations, provoke struggles over fisheries' social representation, and open up novel avenues for cooperation and change, indicating ambiguity in the social and cultural implications of neoliberal modes of governance. Finally, the paper suggests that the ascendancy of the MSC has sparked the emergence of new political and economic geographies of certification and ecolabeling in Alaska and other jurisdictions where place-specific and other initiatives vie for governance and market legitimacy.

a b s t r a c tThe past few decades have witnessed the reconfiguration of a sweep of industries and sectors to more closely mirror economic models, often interpreted as a hallmark of neoliberal reordering in the growing body of scholarship on the topic. Analyses have emphasized not simply the primacy of market designs in these transformations, but also their performative force: the degree to which they bring into being the phenomena they would seem to merely describe. While studies have begun to probe how transformations are effected through market devices, less attention has been directed toward understanding the conditions under which performative properties take hold, or are confounded. This article outlines recent shifts in the operations of a commercial salmon fishery in southwest Alaska in order to examine how broader modes of industry restructuring are accomplished, at least in part, through the material reworking of everyday objects and actions, such as market goods and the practices through which they are produced and consumed. It demonstrates that the abstract designs that inform fishery change, including rationalization and niche-marketing efforts, emerge not merely from the minds of economic analysts but also, and perhaps even more consequentially, through the material reconfiguration of fish flesh. At the same time, ethnographic evidence from southwest Alaska reveals the limits of performative reordering as well: Salmon fishers and their products are never very smoothly remade in the image of market models. The article argues that market materialities thus constitute both vehicles for and disruptions to the worldly realizations of neoliberal designs.

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Across scholarly and popular accounts, self-reliance is often interpreted as either the embodiment of individual entrepreneurialism, as celebrated by neoliberal designs, or the basis for communitarian localism, increasingly imagined as central to environmental and social sustainability. In both cases, self-reliance is framed as an antidote to the failures of larger state institutions or market economies. This paper offers a different framework for understanding self-reliance by linking insights drawn from agrarian studies to current debates on alternative economies. Through an examination of the social worlds of semisubsistence producers in peripheral zones in the Global North, we show how everyday forms of self-reliance are mutually constituted with states and markets, particularly through interactions with labor institutions and hybrid property regimes linking individual and collective interests. We draw on empirical data from two ethnographic case studies connected by a shared colonial history and continuing local mythologies of frontier self-sufficiency: salmon fisheries in rural Alaska in the US, and agrofood economies in socialist and postsocialist Lithuania. In each site we find that although local expressions of self-reliance diverge in critical respects from neoliberal visions, these forms of everyday autonomy are nevertheless enlisted to promote market liberalization, ultimately threatening the very conditions that have long sustained semisubsistence producers' self-reliance in the first place.

Like many environmental controversies today, the debate over the proposed Pebble Mine in a salmon-producing region of Alaska centres on the development and contestation of scientific projections of risk. This paper traces the participatory public process surrounding a risk assessment of potential mining impacts to examine how forums that join expert and lay knowledge shape scenarios of future imperilment and influence environmental politics in the present. It draws on ethnographic research to analyse how risk assessments demand the delineation of spatial, social, and temporal boundaries that provoke tensions, or 'overflows', which reveal the constraints of existing frameworks. In the Pebble debate, the public process generated overflows that expose conflicting claims to knowledge and authority, reflecting the risk assessment's overarching, if often frustrated, effort to separate scientific and technical truths from political contestations. The paper shows how these overflows spurred generative effects, new visions that remake spatial, social, and temporal relations in the face of imperilment. It argues that despite the limitations of common consultative processes and discourses of risk, the negotiation of multiple forms of knowledge and authority in the public view can nevertheless open new spaces and social formations for the exercise of politics.