a b s t r a c tThis essay examines neoliberal forms of resource governance and emerging struggles over control of sea space between coastal fishers, the para-statal oil industry and government authorities in the State of Tabasco, Mexico. The analysis focuses on the changing mechanisms of resource governance and networking related to contested claims over rights to offshore space. The study is based on material collected during ethnographic field research in Tabasco in 2011-2014. By linking a post-Foucauldian approach to governmentality with a Deleuzian perspective on networks, our research examines resource governance as a socio-political arena, constructed in negotiation between multiple governmental, private and civil society actors, including heterogeneous groups from local populations. The study demonstrates how hybrid techniques of resource governance lead to fishers' socio-spatial displacement, marginalization in the fields of political representation and subjection to ideas of aquaculture entrepreneurship. The ensemble of private regulation and governmental control provides a venue for drawing fishers into clientelist practices of governing while it diffuses questions of responsibility. These modes of governance fragment the fishers' efforts to mobilize politically, making them rely on less visible networks of contestation shaped by heterogeneous fishing groups, with varying access to resources and political representation. Recent transformations in environmental legislation and the fishers' mobile tactics of networking may offer opportunities for them to reclaim their resource rights.

No abstract

Marine extraction accounts for one third of the world's hydrocarbon production. Several analyses suggest that seismic surveys employed in oil exploration harm marine life; however, their long-term impacts have not been extensively studied. We examine debates between fishers, the oil industry, and governmental authorities over the effects of oil explorations in Tabasco, Mexico. The study employs ideas from historical ontology in tracing the contested production of truth-claims about exploration in the context of scientific uncertainty. It shows how actors, through their different engagements with the sea, and with different degrees of power, frame claims about the relations between exploration and fish. We argue that fishers, through their efforts to "think like fish" produce situated knowledges about the effects of oil exploration. They explain a disappearance of fish by their understanding that seismic surveys disturb fish migration, impair the hearing of fish and cause fish death. Oil company and governmental representatives frame the impacts of oil exploration as insignificant by separating environmental and social dimensions, by isolating individual exploration events, and by arguing that possible effects are transitional. Due to scientific indeterminacy, oil exploration is malleable in the hands of powerful political representations that understate its possible impacts on marine socio-environments.

Media representations of environmental conflicts between companies and communities play an important role in influencing ideas about the rightful exploitation of natural resources. This article examines local newspapers' representations of fishers' claims over resource access in a conflict between fishers and the oil industry in Tabasco, Mexico. Our analysis is based on articles from two newspapers dating from 2003-2004 and 2007-2012, and ethnographic data from 2011-2012. Drawing on Boltanski and Thevenot's theory of justification, discussions on patrimonial collectivities, and studies of media and social movements, we suggest that Tabascan newspapers reshape fishers' claims over resource access by portraying fisheries and oil as patrimony. Being an ambivalent vocabulary for the defence of space and locality within a conflict over natural-resource enclosure, the newspaper narratives of patrimony both invoke subaltern concerns and reconstrue state authority and local hierarchies. Furthermore, the newspaper narratives are interconnected with fisher leaders' narratives, in particular, while misrepresenting different fisher groups' arguments, and thereby contribute to political division among the fishers as a whole.