Eleventh International Conference on Food Studies

Abstract

Many scholars note the significant impacts that anthropogenic changes to the global climate will cause in fish stocks, including those that make up important global commercial fisheries. Moreover, changes not only to stock size but also to the ranges of species have already begun to affect social, political, and economic dynamics between and within countries. Although there’s a growing literature on how international law and national systems of fisheries management should address these issues, additional focus on the concerns of community-level fisheries stakeholders is warranted. Few have considered the impacts of climate change on inshore, largely owner-operator, fisheries from the perspective of the stakeholders themselves. The nexus of climate change and fisheries politics brings us to the intersection of two “wicked” problems, to use Rittel and Webber’s (1973) term for complex challenges whose solutions require input from multiple perspectives and fields of expertise. The same intertwined social, political, ecological, and economic systems that complicate responses to climate change on various levels of governance pose similarly daunting challenges in fisheries management. The sociopolitical complications found in fishing communities raise particularly thorny issues, because, as Hilborn (2007) notes, “fishermen respond to regulation in ways that often surprise managers, and managers must understand the motivation and incentives for fishermen to understand how they respond.” Focusing on the motivation and incentives that move fisheries stakeholders, this paper explores how fishing communities in Iceland, Norway, and the U.S. perceive climate change and how these perceptions shape community responses to their chronic and escalating climate challenges.