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In introducing the contributions to this special section, we explore the links between social and juridical concepts of normativity and science and technology. We follow the Legal Pluralism challenge to the notion of state law as the sole source of normative order and point to how technological transformation creates a pluralistic legal universe that takes on new shapes under conditions of globalization. We promote a science and technology studies (STS)-inspired reworking of Legal Pluralism and suggest expanding the portfolio of legally effective regimes of ordering to include the normativity generated by materiality and technology. This normativity is amply demonstrated in the case studies included in the papers which make up this special section. We conclude that the inclusion of approaches developed in STS research helps analytically to overcome what we view as an incomplete law project, one unable to deal with the technicized lifeworlds of a global modernity. The contributions to this special section illustrate that technomaterial change cannot be understood without recognition of the role of normative impacts, and conversely, the legal pluriverse cannot be understood without recognition of the normative role of techno-material arrangements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal lobster fishing area (LFA) boundaries are part of the infrastructure controlling the temporal and spatial scale of lobster fishing in Atlantic Canada. Changes in the materiality of fishing and accompanying challenges to normative orders affecting access rules have together destabilized the spatial boundaries of LFAs. Changes in lobster distribution, gear innovations to fish in deeper waters, legal maneuverings over licensing, and competition with aquaculture for marine space all challenge LFA boundaries, which changes the distribution of fishing industry benefits and disrupts long-standing local values. Federal managers of the fishery struggle to deal with new assemblages of technology and law and how they interact with marine space. Examining the technology/legal pluralism nexus and their relationship with administrative lines in the water exposes how both affect more-than-human-spatial assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interdisciplinary team of academics and representatives of fishing fleets and government collaborated to study the emerging requirements for sustainability in Canada's fisheries. Fisheries assessment and management has focused on biological productivity with insufficient consideration of social (including cultural), economic, and institutional (governance) aspects. Further, there has been little discussion or formal evaluation of the effectiveness of fisheries management. The team of over 50 people (i) identified a comprehensive set of management objectives for a sustainable fishery system based on Canadian policy statements, (ii) combined objectives into an operational framework with relevant performance indicators for use in management planning, and (iii) undertook case studies that investigated some social, economic, and governance aspects in greater detail. The resulting framework extends the suite of widely accepted ecological aspects (productivity and trophic structure, biodiversity, and habitat–ecosystem integrity) to include comparable economic (viability and prosperity, sustainable livelihoods, distribution of access and benefits, regional–community benefits), social (health and well-being, sustainable communities, ethical fisheries), and institutional (legal obligations, good governance structure, effective decision-making) aspects of sustainability. This work provides a practical framework for implementation of a comprehensive approach to sustainability in Canadian fisheries. The project also demonstrates the value of co-construction of collaborative research and co-production of knowledge that combines and builds on the strengths of academics, industry, and government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the Harper Government of Canada (2006-2015) shut down both debate about threats and research into environmental risk, a strategy that Canadian scientists characterized as the "death of evidence." Based on interviews with scientists who research risks to the marine environment, we explore the shifting relationship between science and the Canadian government by tracing the change in the mode of risk calculation supported by the Harper administration and the impact of this change. Five themes emerged from the interviews: erosion of science research capacity, resulting limitations in understanding risk, declining influence on policy and regulation, redirection of public science funds to support the private sector, and the need to broaden the science knowledge base. The Canadian death of evidence controversy represents a challenge to science and technology studies (STS) scholars who wish to maintain a critical and reflexive perspective on the scientific enterprise without supporting attacks on evidence. While subsequent Canadian governments may simply return science to an unreflexively privileged knowledge status, we view this as equally damaging to broad risk calculation and democratic science. We suggest instead that a broader gathering of matters of concern will always be essential to risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Management of and planning for the Canadian marine environment can be disrupted by conflict, but conflict is inevitable given the plurality of actors, interests, values, and uses of marine space. Unresolved conflict may impede governance objectives and threaten the sustainability of social-ecological systems. Innovative institutional arrangements such as adaptive comanagement theoretically reduce conflict and support sustainable management. The southwest New Brunswick Bay of Fundy Marine Advisory Committee (MAC) was assembled in 2004 to address conflict between marine users and to further marine planning. As an innovative planning institution influenced by comanagement theory, the MAC experience served as a case study to develop governance measures for the Canadian Fisheries Research Network Comprehensive Fisheries Sustainability Framework, which includes a consideration of ecological, social, economic, and governance dimensions of sustainability. One of the most important but neglected aspects of sustainability measurements involves the assessment of governance and planning effectiveness. An assessment of the MAC experience through a comprehensive sustainability evaluation framework offers significant lessons for advancing the theoretical and empirical literature on adaptive comanagement through deeper consideration of challenges in creating institutions of "good governance." In doing so, the case study also contributes to the Comprehensive Fisheries Sustainability Framework by testing some measures of governance effectiveness, including co-operation, resources, transparency, accountability, and inclusivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An expanding fish stock offers a rare opportunity to support fishing enterprises whose traditional fisheries have diminished or failed. The Eastern Nova Scotia snow crab fishery is one example, where in 2005, a growing stock allowed benefit-sharing among more than 700 harvesters. As a contributing case study of social and institutional aspects of sustainability, we review the background of that fishery and the outcomes of the redistribution of fishery benefits. Based on more than 50 semistructured interviews, the case study demonstrates how conflict has settled into cooperation, with the fishery remaining biologically sound and highly beneficial to individuals and their communities. However, the method chosen to manage the distribution in Eastern Nova Scotia has not guaranteed that benefits will remain in local communities. In other jurisdictions, alternative approaches developed in conjunction with broad-based harvester organizations demonstrate better benefit retention in local communities. When compared with the Canada Fisheries Research Network Sustainability Framework, this case study offers insights into the benefits that thoughtful resource redistribution can provide, illustrating that fishery policy decisions must anticipate long-term implications and should apply a definition of fisheries sustainability that includes community well-being, in this case, as evidenced in local licence retention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a preliminary expsloration of the relationship between audit culture and legal pluralism. Audits that employ a range of indicators are increasingly the tool of choice for managing a range of human endeavors, including natural resource exploitation. This is true at many different scales of governance. But audit culture has also increasingly come under attack as failing to live up to the claims of enhancing transparency and accountability. Who is harnessing the power of indicators and performance audits? Who benefits from these measurements? How is governance impacted by the audit approach? We address these questions in the specific context of legal pluralism generated by multiple levels of regulation affecting fishing enterprises. In seeking to develop a 'report card' approach to assessing Canadian fisheries as part of Project 1.1 of the Canadian Fisheries Research Network, we have explored the failure to effectively incorporate social, governance and cultural indicators in many global examples. There is also a lack of attention to power dynamics and of the institutional resistance to performance indicators that measure the governors rather than the governed. Finally, this paper asks how the normative drive of audits can or will interact with legal pluralism. The case studies suggest the need for careful thought on the interactions of legal pluralism and the audit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In natural resource management, law and temporality have interesting dimensions that are complicated by perceptions of and relations with environment. This paper examines the relationship between legal pluralism, temporality and oceans management. Oceans are managed at multiple levels with multiple chronometers. Intemational standards encourage policy reform at a rapid pace, introducing in quick succession and over a short time-frame concepts such as privatization, communitybased management, integrated management, evidence-based management, ecosystembased management, spatial management and adaptive management for sustainability. There is often a temporal dissonance between these and national regulation, which tends to follow such policy directions more slowly. Meanwhile, the development of new institutions at the local level to facilitate management of localized resources is occurring at a glacial pace, with many barriers and roadblocks along the way. The lack of synchronization in regulatory chronometers is only enhanced by temporal challenges in scientific methodology, which complicate the science-to-policy nexus. This paper uses a case study from the Canadian Maritimes inshore fishery to examine scalar issues, sustainability shortfalls and the stratifying effects of these interesting temporal challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1992, integrated management has been promoted as the solution to challenges facing governments and civil society around the world when managing natural resources. It was argued that integrated management could lead to sustainable development if new participatory approaches to social learning could be developed. Since that time, social learning theory has been an important component of resource management literature. This paper argues that until social learning theory leans more heavily on group processes of transformative learning, sustainable development will elude us. Further, a process of systematic, critical reflection is key to transformative learning, as we illustrate using a five-year research project into the role of communities in integrated management in the Canadian Maritimes. Our experience shows how critical reflection processes can strengthen participatory research to further inform the practice of integrated management. We conclude by observing that room must be made for critical reflection and for true social learning in all integrated management institutions, whether community-based or government-initiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bay of Fundy along the southwest coast of New Brunswick, Canada is one of the most densely stocked finfish aquaculture areas in the world. An inshore multi-species fishery that dates back to the earliest European settlement shares these waters, and has been the economic mainstay of coastal communities. These inshore fishermen are increasingly displaced by the expanding aquaculture industry. A recent study conducted among fishermen in Southwest New Brunswick recorded their observations about the environmental impact of finfish aquaculture and the consequences for their commercial fishery. Fishermen all reported significant environmental degradation around aquaculture sites. Within 2 years of an operation being established, fishermen reported that gravid female lobsters as well as herring avoid the area, scallop and sea urchin shells become brittle, scallop meat and sea urchin roe becomes discolored. The use of chemicals to control sea lice on farmed salmon has also caused lobster, crab and shrimp kills. These and other concerns suggest that more comprehensive and detailed studies are required to establish the environmental and economic interactions of aquaculture and the inshore fishery, as well as on the stocks on which that fishery rely. The study also points to the need for more effective use of fishermen's knowledge in designing such studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on lobster fishing and the challenges related to its marketing. The need of improvement in the market share and price and the role of Coastal Community University Research Alliance (CURA) are discussed. The lobster traceability project as proposed by many jurisdictions and the need of multiple regulatory reactions is considered. The sustainability certification and the role of European Union are also discussed.

Both the Canadian Constitution and several Supreme Court decisions have guaranteed Canada's First Nations special rights to natural resources including lands, waters, and fisheries. In acting on these rights, however, aboriginal peoples of Canada not been successful in arguing that their activities should be guided by the objectives, rules and protocols established by their First Nation, and not by those of the post-colonial Government of Canada. More recently, the 1999 Marshall decision of the Supreme Court of Canada recognized the Treaty Right of the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy peoples to rely on natural resources for a 'moderate livelihood' and a 'communal level of benefit'. While this decision was met with uncertainly and some hostility by the non-native population, it did result in the government offering new program support to First Nations communities engaged in the commercial fishery in the Canadian Maritimes. This paper assesses those programs and provides an analysis of what First Nation communities have lost and gained in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented which discusses topics within the issue including on the demand for special rights in natural resources, the rising cost and failure of command and control natural resource management systems, and the clarity, legitimacy and respect that help understand barriers facing indigenous people.

Focuses on several ethnographical studies concerning the Andes Region. Relevance of common conceptualizations of marginality on a state society; Crosscutting themes common among books about Andean ethnography; Andean continuum present in the research studies.

In recent years, all the social sciences have come under pressure to produce research that has public policy implications. But how implicated should those social sciences be when their policy advice leads to unexpected and perhaps detrimental outcomes? This paper explores this issue using the example of economics and private property rights in the Canadian Maritime fisheries. It compares and contrasts economic models of property rights with those in anthropology and law to show where and why economics has gone astray in its fish property rights models. It suggests that, having gone astray, economic policy advice on fisheries property systems is flawed. It concludes that economists should pay more attention to the role of their rhetoric in the construction of expectations and outcomes that make their recommendations seem the more reasonable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on the "Journal of Legal Pluralism" (JLP) and legal pluralism. It says that Gordon R. Woodman, who will be replaced by Melanie G. Wiber as sole editor-in-chief of JLP, will become an associate editor. It also discusses topics in the Nr. 62 of JLP including the decentralisation in Moluccas, Indonesia and African customary laws. Meanwhile, the Commission on Legal Pluralism's international conference will be held in Cape Town, South Africa on September 8-10, 2011.

This introduction to the special feature describes the development and application of a "full-spectrum sustainability" evaluation framework that emerged from a transdisciplinary research process. The framework and corresponding case studies described in this paper originated in the work of a Canadian Fisheries Research Network project that sought to enhance fisheries management by including diverse social-ecological considerations in fisheries management evaluation. The first section discusses the tendency of sustainability evaluation frameworks in fisheries to focus on ecological and economic considerations and introduces the Canadian Fisheries Research Network's four pillar approach, which includes ecological, economic, social and cultural, and institutional/ governance categories. To illustrate the comprehensive nature of this framework, the second section provides a comparison of the framework with elements in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. The third section provides an overview of the eight papers in this special feature that explore the development and application of full-spectrum sustainability. The conclusion synthesizes some key findings, highlighting four overall critical and ongoing challenges associated with advancing full-spectrum sustainability evaluation in Canada and elsewhere: the politics of transdisciplinary research; integrating social considerations into management agencies reluctant to move beyond ecological and economic considerations; dynamic and diverse issues involved in supporting robust and inclusive governance processes; and translating technical frameworks into usable practical instruments for different societal actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Fisheries sustainability is recognized to have four pillars: ecological, economic, social (including cultural) and institutional (or governance). Although international agreements, and legislation in many jurisdictions, call for implementation of all four pillars of sustainability, the social, economic and institutional aspects (i.e., the “human dimensions”) have not been comprehensively and collectively addressed to date. This study describes a framework for comprehensive fisheries evaluation developed by the Canadian Fisheries Research Network (CFRN) that articulates the full spectrum of ecological, economic, social and institutional objectives required under international agreements, together with candidate performance indicators for sustainable fisheries. The CFRN framework is aimed at practical fisheries evaluation and management and has a relatively balanced distribution of elements across the four pillars of sustainability relative to 10 alternative management decision support tools and indicator scorecards, which are heavily focused on ecological and economic aspects. The CFRN framework has five immediate uses: (a) It can serve as a logic frame for defining management objectives; (b) it can be used to define alternate management options to achieve given objectives; (c) it can serve as a tool for comparing management scenarios/options in decision support frameworks; (d) it can be employed to create a report card for comprehensive fisheries management evaluation; and (e) it is a tool for practical implementation of an integrated social–ecological system approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An obituary for Franz Von Benda-Beckmann, head of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology Working Group on Legal Pluralism from 2000 to 2012, is presented.

While international agreements and legislation call for incorporation of four pillars of sustainability, the social (including cultural), economic and institutional aspects (the 'human dimension') have been relatively neglected to date. Three key impediments have been identified: a relative lack of explicit social, economic and institutional objectives; a general lack of process (frameworks, governance) for routine integration of all four pillars of sustainability; and a bias towards biological considerations. Practical integration requires a 'systems' approach with explicit consideration of strategic and operational aspects of management; multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary evaluations; practical objectives for the four pillars of sustainability; appropriate participation; and a governance system that is able to integrate these diverse considerations in management. We challenge all involved in fisheries to immediately take five practical steps toward integrating ecological, economic, social and institutional aspects: (1) Adopt the perspective of the fishery as a 'system' with interacting natural, human and management elements; (2) Be aware of both strategic and operational aspects of fisheries assessment and management; (3) Articulate overarching objectives that incorporate all four pillars of sustainability; (4) Encourage appropriate (and diverse) disciplinary participation in all aspects of research, evaluation and management; and (5) Encourage development of (or emulate) participatory governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fishers' knowledge research (FKR) aims to enhance the use of experiential knowledge of fish harvesters in fisheries research, assessment, and management. Fishery participants are able to provide unique knowledge, and that knowledge forms an important part of "best available information" for fisheries science and management. Fishers' knowledge includes, but is much greater than, basic biological fishery information. It includes ecological, economic, social, and institutional knowledge, as well as experience and critical analysis of experiential knowledge. We suggest that FKR, which may in the past have been defined quite narrowly, be defined more broadly to include both fishery observations and fishers "experiential knowledge" provided across a spectrum of arrangements of fisher participation. FKR is part of the new and different information required in evolving "ecosystem-based" and "integrated" management approaches. FKR is a necessary element in the integration of ecological, economic, social, and institutional considerations of future management. Fishers' knowledge may be added to traditional assessment with appropriate analysis and explicit recognition of the intended use of the information, but fishers' knowledge is best implemented in a participatory process designed to receive and use it. Co-generation of knowledge in appropriately designed processes facilitates development and use of fishers' knowledge and facilitates the participation of fishers in assessment and management, and is suggested as best practice in improved fisheries governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]