Species Commodification: A Dialectical Perspective on Fisheries Policy

A theoretically promised confluence of favorable biological, economic, and social outcomes in neoliberal solutions for fisheries is illusory. The required commodification of the fish, including the species and accompanying oceanic commons enclosures, result in contradictions that cannot be understood within the neoclassical economic paradigm. A process of dialectical abstraction and qualitative modeling exposes the source and mechanism of the contradictions providing an alternative basis for discourse on the fishery and the commons.