Caitríona CARTER

Researcher, Irstea Bordeaux

Caitríona Carter is a political scientist working at Irstea, Bordeaux in the research team: Environment, Actors and Territorial Dynamics. She is a member of the LabEx COTE transition group, working with colleagues to develop the research programme for the coming decade. Her main research interests are on the politics of interdependence governing ocean-based industries - fisheries, aquaculture and coastal-rural interconnections – and the institutionalisation of a sustainable maritime economy. She is coordinator of the LabEx COTE funded research project ECOGOV (2015-2019) which examines the comparative governance of ecosystems (marine, estuarine, forest) in New Aquitaine. Her recent peer-reviewed book sets out a new analytical framework of ‘sustainability interdependence’, applied to a comparative analysis of the politics of aquaculture (salmon in Scotland; trout in Aquitaine; seabass and seabream in Greece): Carter, C. 2018. The Politics of Aquaculture: Sustainability interdependence, territory and regulation in fish farming. Abingdon: Routledge. The framework recomposes the concept of sustainability by integrating it into a broader theory of political change capturing policy-polity dynamics in political economy: Carter, C. 2018. ‘Interdépendance’ in Hay, C., Smith, A. (Eds) Dictionnaire d'économie politique, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.  

> Frontier politics in cod sea fisheries

In this talk, I will present a political science perspective on the theme exploring frontiers and boundaries between ecology and society. I will do this through presenting a thought-provoking case study of deep change in the governing of cod sea fisheries in Scotland. In this case, public and collective private actors (fishers, processors, environmental NGOs…) worked together to transform frontiers and boundaries between marine ecosystems and their industrial practices. Whereas these frontiers (expressed in terms of policy instruments of Total Allowable Catches and Quotas) had been rigid and contested, following change they became more flexible (expressed in terms of Catch Quota Systems, certification), in line with both ecosystem functioning and mixed fisheries practice. From this case, we can acquire important understandings. The case reveals that frontiers and boundaries between ecology and society are neither inevitable, nor spontaneous, but are socially constructed and subject to politics. Further, frontiers between ecology and society are not the only ones at stake in the ecological transition of industries. To alter relationships, actors also had to negotiate frontiers between territory, between states and markets and between different types of science and knowledge.