Harvesting a knowledge commons: collective action, transparency, and innovation at the Portland Fish Exchange

Abstract

While localist visions of alternative food systems advocate for the expansion of local ecological knowledge through more proximate producerconsumer relationships, globalized seafood supply-demand chains persist. Moving beyond this dichotomy, commons scholars recognize that collective action among resource users at the local level can shape cross-scalar producer relations with government and more capitalized firms operating in regional and global markets. In the case of the New England groundfishery, a quasi-public fish auction not only transformed the scalar, logistical, and financial parameters of harvester-buyer relationships, it altered the production and use of local knowledge among some harvesters, and their technological choices. Resulting markets offer potential benefits that extend to broader publics, by increasing the monetary value and experimental development of a knowledge commons. Qualitative analysis of field data shows that with new market transparency, fish are no longer valued as an undifferentiated commodity, but as a variety of products with individually nuanced price structures. Displacement of local seafood buyers incurred some shoreside job losses, but fishers on smaller, owner-operated boats in multi-generational fishing harbours benefit particularly from new opportunities compared to larger, fleet boats due to different labour relations, allocations of decision-making responsibilities, observational contexts, and associated information flows. Implications for the mobilization of knowledge-action linkages to influence formal resource management arenas merit further research. 156Jennifer F. Brewer of Geography, Planning, and Environment. In addition to many anonymous informants, I wish to thank past and present staff of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance and members of the Fish Locally Collaborative for building a big tent, asking hard questions, seeking informed solutions, and maintaining a deeply integrative and committed spirit. Thank you also to the editors and anonymous reviewers, for their insightful and supportive comments.

Routledge Handbook Of Food As A Commons

“…This goes beyond the interdisciplinary or singlediscipline teams that are more and more common in research, especially on global challenges, because it consists of creating spaces where non-governmental organization, producers, government agencies, academicians, and others can collaborate with formal agreements that protect the space of each partner. Examples include potato research in several countries leading to new management systems, including the famous Potato Park in Peru which establishes a protected agroecology region (Ortiz et al, 2013;; participatory action research that engages academicians and producers (e.g., Mendez et al, 2015); and research on the management of natural resources (e.g., Brewer, 2014;Walker and Salt, 2012). Transdisciplinary research teams that bring together people within academic institutions or government and people from social movements and NGOs are another example, when results are open access.…”

Engagement in a Public Forum: Knowledge, Action, and Cosmopolitanism

“…Different areas of the coast are radically different, ranging from flat, sandy benthos in the south, to dramatically contoured rocky benthos in the east, with patchy variations along the intervening peninsulas. This biophysical complexity makes local knowledge valuable and fishermen therefore share their most precious fishing‐related information with only a few close family members or friends (Brewer ; Wilson et al ).…”

“…Partly by providing more fluid, imaginative discourse than any governmental meeting, and a more diverse audience than any blowy day fish house gripe session, the annual event hastens conversations that might otherwise stall in impasse or entropy. At the Forum, plans evolved to establish a seafood display auction as a public–private partnership, transforming the region's finfish markets by raising product quality, increasing profits, and attracting processing plants (Brewer ; Kaplan ). Shrimpers embraced gear modifications and repeatedly rejected entry limits, thereby prioritizing equity of access.…”