Introduction

Fish capture and aquaculture are the central articulating links of the fish chain, connecting consumer demand to ecosystem impact through the social organisation and technologies of resource extraction (and input, in the case of aquaculture). This chapter is concerned with the capture of wild marine resources; that which follows focuses on fish culture.

Capture is the complex of social and technological factors that forms the immediate context for the extraction of fish and their transport to landing sites. Matching its linking position in the fish chain, fish capture is also central to fisheries governance as the set of practices that connects humans most directly to their marine environments. In the early 21st century, human interaction with the sea has become troubled. It has now been conclusively demonstrated that anthropogenic pressure on marine ecosystems through fishing has severely degraded the world's marine ecosystems (Pauly et al. 2002). The degradation of marine ecosystems in turn threatens the livelihoods of coastal populations. As part of a sustained attempt to build more positive and enduring connections between people and the sea, governance of fisheries has to challenge the incentives and institutions that have contributed to human overuse and abuse of marine ecosystems.

This chapter portrays fish capture in two parts. First, it presents a ‘global’ view of capture fisheries as ordered by the academic lens. Second, it presents one facet of the ‘local’ view: the livelihood rationality that shapes small-scale fisheries. While a useful way of organising the representation of capture fisheries, this expository division of global and local does not rest on mutually exclusive categories. The global academic view on the dynamic of resource degradation in capture fisheries, for example, necessarily owes much to the observations of local fisher informants while having its own disciplinary, paradigmatic, and purely chauvinistic ‘subjective’ biases. Similarly, an analysis of livelihoods could be just as well made from an external standpoint that classifies and orders for simplicity rather than listening for complexity. One of the key governance lessons of this chapter is that it is necessary to be able to move between the global and local positions, while recognising their interactions and overlaps, in order to grasp the diversity, complexity, and dynamics of fish capture and its governance.