The transformation of Scottish fisheries: Sustainable interdependence from ‘net to plate’

The European Union's Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is often considered inflexible and inherently failing. Yet, the recent experience of Scottish fisheries suggests that change is possible. Not confining themselves to limiting visions of the CFP, private collective and public actors across the industry in Scotland have worked to give new meaning to fisheries practices through institutionalizing their own understandings of sustainability. This is not just rhetoric. Rather, industry conditions of collapsing stocks have been re-problematized; new spaces of public/private action have been created and engaged in; new incentive-based policy instruments have been designed and operationalized. Throughout, interconnections between natural and social orders have been acknowledged and built into policymaking processes. However, these transformations could not have been achieved if other forms of political and economic interdependence had not also been recognised and worked upon. These include techno-political interdependencies of knowledge; spatial interdependencies of territory and domain interdependencies of production and commercial practices. It is active awareness of these which ultimately enabled actors to transform their fisheries from ‘net to plate’.