Abstract
This article examines the development of U.S. offshore aquaculture policy and governance through the lens of assemblage and mobility. It first characterizes the offshore aquaculture policy assemblage and identifies three “strands” of policy reform that have taken hold and influenced policy, regulatory, and governance development over time: (1) federal legislation, (2) regional management, and (3) administrative cooperation. The article then draws on two specific cases of policy mobility, based in California and the Gulf of Mexico, to show how policy models and ideas moved not only across U.S. geographies, but also across time and institutional scales. Together, the analysis demonstrates the sociomateriality of policy; it shows how policy ideas and practices travel and transform, emphasizing where policies come from, how they are reshaped by local geographies and practices, and, in turn, how they reshape the broader policy landscape in the process. Among other outcomes, these mobilities led to an infusion of precautionary policy ideas at the national scale, a critical reinterpretation of policy authority by a federal agency, and greater interest in shellfish aquaculture and administrative cooperation across all institutional scales. By exploring subnational processes in a novel policy context (oceans), this article contributes to emerging work on policy assemblage and mobility, advances research on oceans geography and governance practices, and argues for greater engagement with the oceans among critical geographers and policy scholars.
The tale [of United States aquaculture] is like a spider’s web with the various pieces so intricately intertwined that taking any simplistic approach would not do justice to the art, science, and personalities involved. (Stickney, 1996: vii)
Introduction
In June 2011, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its parent organization, the Department of Commerce (DOC), issued joint national policy statements supporting the expansion of domestic marine aquaculture (DOC, 2011; NOAA, 2011). While they are broad ranging and include many scientific, social, and economic goals, an essential component of both statements is a unified call to clarify the national policy framework for marine aquaculture, particularly in the offshore federal waters of the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ; 3–200 nautical miles offshore). Most U.S. marine aquaculture occurs in protected inshore spaces of the coastal zones governed by adjacent states (state waters; 0–3 nautical miles offshore), many of which have mature policy systems for the sector. In contrast, offshore aquaculture is a relatively new activity with an uncertain policy framework in the waters beyond state jurisdiction.
The release of the dual NOAA and DOC policies capped over a decade of unprecedented attention to offshore aquaculture in the United States (e.g., U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, 2004; U.S. Ocean Action Plan, 2004) that sought to operationalize the National Aquaculture Act (NAA) of 1980, which promotes the sector but provides little practical regulatory guidance. Local, regional, and national policy developments built on NOAA’s assertions of authority over offshore space (e.g., DOC and NOAA, 2005; NMFS and NOAA, 2002; NOAA, 1998) and featured demonstration projects for commercial offshore operations. Aquaculture critics and advocates alike pushed numerous suggestions into the national policy arena, demonstrating an earnest interest in reform. Yet despite these efforts and their high profile, a singular policy solution for the offshore aquaculture question remains elusive. U.S. offshore aquaculture continues to be governed through a piecemeal and complicated set of laws, regulations, and management systems. Because of this, only a handful of offshore farms currently operate in U.S. federal waters (a total of three commercial and/or demonstration shellfish farms off New England and California; Fairbanks, 2016; Lester et al., 2018), even as the coastal aquaculture sector and interest in new offshore permits have grown significantly in recent years.
This article uses assemblage theory to explore U.S. offshore aquaculture policy, focusing on the mobilities that have shaped the sector’s unsettled policy and governance framework. This analytic approach attends to the dynamic and heterogeneous context of socionatural ocean systems and the complex arrangements governing them (Fairbanks et al., 2018; cf. Li, 2007). The concept of policy mobility emphasizes the movement of policies across spaces and borders, including where policies and policy ideas come from, how they travel, and how they are (or are not) reshaped and “fixed” by local geographies, actors, and practices (Lovell, 2017; McCann and Ward, 2013). By exploring subnational processes in a novel context (oceans), this article contributes to recent research that aims to “think policy mobility beyond the local-global binary” (Prince, 2017: 336) and examines the role of partial or failed policy mobilities (Lovell, 2017, 2019). It also advances emerging work in oceans geography that seeks to understand the diversity, complexity, and dynamics of oceans governance systems (Campbell et al., 2016). Building on this, I draw on recent scholarship that problematizes the perceived reach and totality of popular state and neoliberal oceans practices (e.g., Fairbanks et al., 2018; St. Martin, 2007) to show how U.S. offshore aquaculture policy mobility generates diverse, and occasionally surprising, policy outcomes. Policy ideas and practices travel and transform, sometimes fixed within one geographic (or institutional) context only to be pushed or pulled elsewhere into new assembled and localized forms.
The article is based on research conducted between 2012 and 2015 on U.S. marine and offshore aquaculture. It follows Peck and Theodore’s (2012) insistence that both “studying up” through state actors and policy processes and “studying out” beyond the state are important to trace policy mobilities across time, space, and scale. Analysis draws on a review of policy documents and 65 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 67 government, industry, and other individuals involved in aquaculture (labelled P# for policy practitioners and O# for those most involved in aquaculture operations). Interviews were transcribed and coded for common themes, ideas, and discourses, as well as for descriptive information about policy developments and mobility. Document review involved identifying, collecting, and examining policy-relevant documents written between approximately 1970 and 2015, with a particular focus on the last two decades when offshore aquaculture interest grew considerably. Reviewed works include public and private sector reports, proposed and passed legislation, historical and internal government documents, hearings, minutes, and public comments.
The article is organized as follows. First, I review the literature on policy assemblages and mobility and put it in conversation with research on oceans and aquaculture governance. Second, I characterize the U.S. offshore aquaculture policy assemblage by describing the existing governance system and the three “strands” of proposed national policy reform that have stabilized over time. It is important to note that while both state and federal waters can exhibit open-ocean or “offshore” conditions—typically considered deeper than 20 m (Lester et al., 2018)—this article focuses primarily on aquaculture efforts in the U.S. EEZ. In the third section, I describe two cases of policy mobility to illustrate how offshore aquaculture policy ideas, reforms, and discourses travel and transform within the federalized system of U.S. oceans governance. Lastly, I conclude with a discussion of the article’s findings and call for further work on the oceans in geographic policy research.
Policy assemblage, policy mobility, and the oceans
Assemblage theory situates policy and socionatural systems as dynamic “geographies of heterogeneous associations” (Murdoch, 1997). Rather than the “structural analysis, scalar progressionism, and predetermined outcomes commonly deployed by political economy,” assemblage emphasizes how different actors are drawn together into complex formations to produce policies and other socionatural outcomes (Ong, 2007: 5). This approach provides for the simultaneous analysis of assembled formations (and their products, e.g., policy statements) as well as the dynamics within them. In other words, assemblage theory foregrounds the relational nature of policies by turning to the “sociomateriality of policy itself” (Prince, 2012), ranging from meetings and reports to ocean spaces, species, and movements.
The relational turn in policy studies is useful for studying the oceans, where broad neoliberal reforms, often led by the state, have drawn on simplified conceptions of oceans systems to ostensibly rationalize and discipline ocean spaces, resources, and peoples (Olson, 2011; Silver, 2013; St. Martin, 2007). These reforms, however, are resisted by a diversity of interested actors as well as the fluid materiality of the sea itself. Whereas offshore aquaculture’s advocates support policy efforts by framing development as a national economic and seafood opportunity, critics have raised concerns about the environmental and social risks of large-scale expansion, state-enabled neoliberalization, and privatization of the oceans (e.g., Benjamin, 2002; Ocean Conservancy, 2011; Skladany et al., 2007). These concerns echo findings from Canada (Silver, 2013), Chile (Barrett et al., 2002), Vietnam (Belton et al., 2011), and elsewhere that have shown the mixed and sometimes negative effects of neoliberal aquaculture policies on communities, livelihood patterns, and environments.
Emerging research has problematized neoliberal oceans governance and popular conceptions of the seas as unpeopled, purely “fixed” by (and for) capital, or constituting the exclusive realm of neoliberal state power (Fairbanks et al., 2018). Snyder and St. Martin (2015), for example, describe the evolution of a fishing village’s community economy that prioritizes ethics and well-being within an otherwise neoliberal fisheries management system. Boucquey et al. (2016) demonstrate how divergent ontologies of the oceans and its management contribute to an unsettled U.S. marine spatial planning process that offers alternatives to rationalized (and neoliberalized) ocean spaces and actors. Jay (2018) similarly uses the case of marine spatial planning to bring attention to the “soft” and “lively” nature of ocean space, arguing we more explicitly position planning processes (and actors) within the flows, relationships, and materiality of oceans assemblages. Emphasizing the role of nonhuman actors, Bear (2013), Steinberg and Peters (2015), and Havice (2018) describe how the characteristics and mobilities of dolphins, ocean waters, and tuna, respectively, shape governance processes beyond human activities and rationalities. In these cases, we can see not only the complexity of oceans assemblages but also the mobility of assembled actors, resources, practices, and policies.
The attendance to mobility in policy assemblage research draws on ideas in geography and critical policy studies to ground an alternative way of studying policy that builds on a rich existing policy transfer literature and its critiques (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2012; Marsh and Evans, 2012; Peck and Theodore, 2015; Prince, 2017). The policy mobility approach focuses not necessarily on any single policy itself as an object of analysis, but rather on the relational and constitutive activities of policymaking and context (McCann and Ward, 2013). In this sense, policies are not simply transferred, but rather translated or transformed in their journeys across space and time. As they are deployed in new contexts, policies are reterritorialized—“embedded in particular socio-spatial relations” (McCann and Ward, 2010: 178)—and reconstituted by local actors and geographies (Jones et al., 2014). In turn, the policies themselves provide lessons, models, and ideas that reshape the broader policy landscape. Consequently, any stability in a policy assemblage is often provisional, challenged by the fluidity and mobility of enrolled actors, policy ideas, and their material contexts.
Rather than being detrimental to policymaking, however, McCann and Ward (2010: 176) argue that this fluidity and the tension between relational and territorial policy is a “productive one [that] produces policies and places.” At sea, for example, Fairbanks et al. (2018) show how regional actors involved in marine spatial planning use various “practices of assemblage” (Li, 2007) to reshape planning in ways that might empower local interests and at times diverge from national policy expectations. Prince (2010) describes how the transfer of creative industries policy from the UK to New Zealand was a necessarily messy process contingent on the countries’ divergent “institutional and cultural realities” (Prince, 2010: 183). McCann and Ward (2010) similarly show how business improvement districts have emerged as desirable models for policymakers, only to change as they are “embedded in particular socio-spatial relations” (McCann and Ward, 2010: 178). These analyses of policy assemblage and mobility recall how global governance trends like neoliberalism ultimately manifest as variegated “actually existing” neoliberalizations, contingent on local context and conditions (Peck and Theodore, 2015).
In this article, I explore the real and proposed transfer of offshore aquaculture policy across time, spaces, and scales within the United States. This responds to calls for more policy mobility research in the domestic (rather than transnational) context (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2012; McCann and Ward, 2012), builds on recent work exploring the previously overlooked roles of subnational institutions (Benson and Jordan, 2011) and incomplete or failed policy mobilities (Lovell, 2017, 2019), and draws on the assertion we follow actors and policy wherever they move in an assemblage (Peck and Theodore, 2012, 2015). While offshore aquaculture has in some respects taken on its own “global form” (Prince, 2010) that is discussed throughout international networks, the development of U.S. offshore aquaculture policy has been (and remains) a predominantly domestic process. The search for national policy models has occasionally included other nations or regions (e.g., Norway and the European Union), and certain transnational offshore aquaculture ideas persist in domestic discussions (e.g., calls for public development funding). These discussions, however, rarely go in depth. Instead, the U.S. offshore aquaculture policy marketplace has been populated by domestic models, with proponents and critics alike pointing to coastal aquaculture programs in states like Maine, Alaska, Hawaii, Washington, and California to help navigate and reform the current system of tangled federal policy.
The domestic focus is for a few reasons. First, offshore aquaculture is a young industry worldwide. Few nations support a viable sector and fewer still have a mature policy framework to act as a model. Second, the complicated but persistent U.S. national policy framework and the difficulties in securing overarching legislation have limited the possibility of broad (and “clean”) policy transfer across borders. Third, offshore aquaculture is subject to an “offshore federalism” (Salcido, 2008) that shapes the national assemblage through local experience (cf. Doyle et al., 2013). Many policy and governance decisions are devolved from piecemeal federal laws to different agencies, regional offices, and state and local practitioners. Interpretation and implementation are often dependent on the everyday practices of these individuals, as well as the context: the aspects of aquaculture to be regulated and the laws governing them (e.g., the Clean Water Act), the geographic spaces and jurisdictions (e.g., oceanographic conditions; state or federal waters), the farmed and wild species involved, and so on. As federal policy is territorialized in different spaces and places, local successes and failures feed back into national discussions, reshaping conditions for future policy developments and problematizing the feasibility (and efficacy) of broad-scale national policy transfer.
In the next section, I characterize the U.S. offshore aquaculture policy assemblage by describing the current baseline policy framework and three emergent “strands” of proposed reform. Although distinct, the policy strands share actors, spaces, and institutions, and have developed in close association with one another. The assemblage has centered at times (and in particular places) around one policy suggestion and elsewhere on another, transforming as mobile policies are reinterpreted and redeployed. In the third section of this paper, I draw on two cases in California and the Gulf of Mexico to illustrate the policy mobilities in the assemblage. Together, the following sections show that U.S. offshore aquaculture policy outcomes are neither predictable nor hegemonic. Rather, policy and governance are emerging in different localized, territorialized, and assembled forms dependent on the actors, spaces, and environments involved.
The U.S. offshore aquaculture policy assemblage
Baseline policy framework for offshore aquaculture
There is no single overarching law dedicated to governing offshore aquaculture in the United States. The current policy framework of piecemeal laws, regulations, and agency responsibilities results from a long and varied history of government conflict, cooperation, and engagement in marine aquaculture that began as far back as the 1960s. While NOAA has claimed primary jurisdiction over many activities related to ocean space and living resources, it alone cannot permit or lease ocean space for offshore aquaculture. At least nine federal agencies and a variety of statutes regulate aquaculture in the U.S. EEZ, while dozens of others are involved (Cicin-Sain et al., 2005). Many gaps and overlaps in authority exist between them. In addition to NOAA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Army Corps) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are typically regarded as the lead federal agencies for administering offshore aquaculture (Showalter, 2009).
In theory, to carry out offshore aquaculture, a prospective operator needs permits from the Army Corps, in coordination with the EPA, to use ocean space and site a farm (Showalter Otts, 2012). Army Corps permits may require consultations with other agencies, most notably NOAA for guidance on potential gear interactions with protected species, habitats, and managed fisheries, but also with other agencies involved in using or regulating ocean space (e.g., vessel traffic). The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires Environmental Assessments (EA) or Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) for prospective farms, depending on their type (e.g., shellfish or finfish) and size. These latter aspects may also necessitate direct EPA involvement regarding pollution and water quality (although this involvement is often unclear; Harvard Law School Emmett Environmental Law & Policy Clinic (HLS EELPC), Environmental Law Institute (ELI), and The Ocean Foundation, 2012). A finfish farm that requires feed inputs and creates waste, for instance, would likely require a full EIS and EPA permits, while most shellfish farms, which are more passive operations, would not (Showalter, 2009; Showalter Otts, 2012).
The entirety of permitting decisions, however, is rarely carried out in the federal headquarters of NOAA, the Army Corps, or other agencies. Instead, regional agency staff carry out consultations, interact with applicants and stakeholders, and work with state bodies to conduct permitting. Moreover, consultations with state and local agencies, which are often required under local laws and the Coastal Zone Management Act (CZMA), are subject to local species, geographies, and policy legacies. As a result, the baseline policy framework leaves space for individual, and often geographically contextualized, decision-making, interpretation, and policy implementation. In some cases, differences in individual staff or office interpretations of laws and regulations can confuse, delay, or hinder permitting and communication between actors (Fairbanks, 2016).
This complicated baseline policy framework guides U.S. offshore aquaculture. Its unsettled nature presents both challenges to responsible development and opportunities for policy to be translated and territorialized in various forms. Consequently, the policy assemblage has bred alternative proposals nationwide, often drawing on localized experiences to inform or justify national reform. In the past decade, these efforts have stabilized into what I identify and describe as three strands of policy reform: (1) federal legislation, (2) regional management, and (3) administrative cooperation.
Three strands of policy reform
Federal legislation
The first strand of offshore aquaculture policy reform focuses on the national scale. It seeks federal legislation for a new, overarching, and comprehensive national framework for aquaculture in the U.S. EEZ that can harmonize existing requirements. Exemplified by influential reports that sought to clarify the path to reform (Cicin-Sain et al., 2001, 2005), this strand also gained traction among lawmakers. Four Congressional offshore aquaculture bills were proposed between 2005 and 2011. While each sought new legislation for offshore development and centralization of regulatory authority within DOC and NOAA, they can be separated into two groups.
First, the National Offshore Aquaculture Acts of 2005 and 2007 were, in many respects, efforts to operationalize the 1980 NAA to enable and develop commercial offshore aquaculture (S. 1195 in 2005; H.R. 2010 and S. 1609 in 2007). The bills were written by NOAA staff, including those in its Aquaculture Program, and sponsored by Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye, a longtime supporter of aquaculture who drafted the original NAA. The bills also found support in the Bush Administration and its Secretary of Commerce. The second group includes the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Acts of 2009 and 2011. These bills focused more heavily on environmental risks and regulation and were supported by environmental and fishing groups, among others (H.R. 4363 in 2009; H.R. 2373 in 2011). They were written with support from the Ocean Conservancy, an organization that has taken a measured and often critical approach to marine aquaculture, and sponsored by California Congresswoman Lois Capps, a proponent of strong environmental policy. The bills sought stringent environmental standards for offshore aquaculture, such as strict operator liability for environmental damages.
While none of these bills became law, they raised the profile of offshore aquaculture significantly, bringing a previously specialized debate to the forefront of national ocean policy. This strand of policy reform, particularly through the 2005 and 2007 bills, is perhaps most reminiscent and clearly linked (by critics) to expanding neoliberal environmental reform as it seeks to rationally create an enabling framework for private commercial offshore development.
Regional management
The second strand of offshore aquaculture policy reform uses the existing federal fisheries law, the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA), to devolve management responsibility for offshore aquaculture to each of the nation’s eight Regional Fishery Management Councils, while consolidating much regulatory authority within NOAA. This strand first developed in the 1990s, when a proposal for a large salmon farm in federal waters prompted NOAA to clarify and claim its authority over offshore aquaculture through the MSA (Johnson and Hayes, 1993). This activity laid a groundwork for the Gulf of Mexico Regional Fisheries Management Council (Gulf Council) to develop the first Fishery Management Plan (FMP) for offshore aquaculture in 2009 (Gulf Council, 2009).
Finalized in early 2016, the FMP for Regulating Offshore Marine Aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf Aquaculture Plan) represents the first test of the regional strand of policy reform, which has found support in NOAA and among some in industry. However, it has faced opposition from some civil society groups and legal challenges to aquaculture’s definition as fishing. Moreover, the strand applies only to “federally managed” fisheries, which includes many commercially valuable finfish and shellfish but not all, such as mussels—a popular candidate species for offshore farming. While not as comprehensive as the first strand, the regional approach also rationally allocates ocean spaces, building on a federal fisheries management system that has shifted toward rationalization schemes and neoliberal governance over the past two decades (Olson, 2011; St. Martin, 2007). The regional council system, however, requires the participation and consideration of local communities and other social factors, suggesting a potential for geographic and institutional difference as policy travels from region to region.
Administrative cooperation
Rather than overhauling regulatory and policy authority, the third strand of offshore aquaculture policy reform builds on the existing baseline policy framework. A more informal and multi-scalar approach, this strand encourages administrative cooperation at the national scale, but also relies on local actors and activities to motivate policy development and regulatory clarification. In this strand, federal agencies and their regional offices are expected to better coordinate with one another to streamline permitting processes under baseline conditions. In a general sense, this helps clarify overlapping and unclear agency responsibilities. More specifically, it encourages the development of “one-stop-shop” permit systems, clearly defined regulatory paths, or integration into broader ocean planning initiatives.
Supporters of this strand encourage local, state, and regional aquaculture actors to push forward with permitting and development to test, clarify, and reshape policy and regulatory conditions. One mussel aquaculture project offshore of Massachusetts, for example, encountered unexpected challenges navigating the permitting requirements of agencies including the Army Corps, Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, and NOAA’s shellfish closure offices (ELI, 2015). However, the project, which is supported by NOAA and Salem (Massachusetts) State University, has used the experience to better define permitting steps for future actors (Maney et al., 2012).
Within the U.S. offshore aquaculture policy assemblage, this strand of reform suggests the most capacity for local involvement and difference offshore. It also provides an alternative pathway for culturing species that are not federally managed fisheries but may be prime candidates due to local oceanographic or ecological conditions (e.g., mussels in New England). The strand promises some oceans enclosure, but allows for creative administrative and community arrangements that diverge from the expectations of monolithic “neoliberal natures,” instead building on the local diversities of the actors and environments at stake (Fairbanks, 2016).
Summary of the three strands of policy reform
We can emphasize a few things about these strands and the offshore aquaculture policy assemblage. First, the 2011 joint aquaculture policies issued by NOAA and the DOC, as well as other federal initiatives, were not produced in isolation. They were motivated by and written in the context of quickly moving policy efforts throughout the country and at different institutional scales, pieced together from aquaculture discussions, reports, and efforts that emerged at different junctures. Second, ideas about a singular or comprehensive state-led neoliberal policy reform likely oversimplify conditions. Actors, even those sharing broadly similar interests, have different ideas about the role and prospects of offshore development, and as policy ideas have travelled through the assemblage, reform efforts have taken on variegated forms. Third, the three policy strands are neither static, linear, nor exclusive. They occur in conversation (and sometimes conflict) with one another, with many actors simultaneously engaging multiple strands at once. NOAA staff, for example, have been involved in drafting legislation, participating in regional rulemaking, and developing local approaches to administrative cooperation. This results in iterative and relational policy processes where activities in different times, places, and scales shape one another. The following section builds on these findings by exploring two cases of offshore aquaculture policy mobility that illustrate the dynamic, relational, and territorial nature of policy.
Mobility in U.S. offshore aquaculture policy
This section discusses two cases of offshore aquaculture policy mobility, California’s 2006 Sustainable Oceans Act (S.B. 201) and the 2009 FMP for Regulating Offshore Marine Aquaculture in the Gulf of Mexico (Gulf Aquaculture Plan). Whereas S.B. 201 emerged as a prominent national policy model when the state law was “scaled up” and translated into proposals for federal legislation, the Gulf Plan shows how policy actions across time, space, and scales led to the development of a regional model for policy. Furthermore, elements of both cases fed back throughout the broader policy assemblage, influencing local efforts toward administrative cooperation. These cases are not an exhaustive exploration of the policy assemblage, but are chosen to illustrate the mobilities of offshore aquaculture policy and their far-reaching, and sometimes surprising, effects.
A model for national reform? Scaling up California S.B. 201
California passed S.B. 201 in 2006 becoming “the first jurisdiction in the United States to set standards and implement a comprehensive management regime for marine aquaculture” (House Committee on Natural Resources (HCNR), 2009). The law centralizes aquaculture leasing within the state Fish and Game Commission, focuses primarily on finfish aquaculture, and contains a series of environmental and social provisions for marine and offshore operations. It requires the preparation of a comprehensive Programmatic Environmental Impact Report (PEIR) that must consider the social (e.g., spatial conflicts), technical (e.g., gear-related), and environmental (e.g., fish escapes) risks of aquaculture. Leases must meet PEIR standards, and lessees are liable for damages caused by their operations and required to ecologically restore their sites after leases end.
From its inception, S.B. 201 was the product of a diverse and multiscalar assemblage. It developed in the context of federal calls for increased aquaculture production, environmental concerns about gaps in the national policy framework (HCNR, 2007; Simitian, 2006b), California’s own history of environmental protections (e.g., the California Marine Life Protection Act), and the state’s lack of comprehensive marine aquaculture policy. S.B. 201 further built on state-level aquaculture experiences in Washington and Maine (Simitian, 2006b) and echoed the findings of the high-profile Pew Oceans Commission (2003), U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (2004), and NOAA’s own draft Code of Conduct for Responsible Aquaculture Development in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (NMFS and NOAA, 2002)—which each called for overarching and precautionary policy frameworks. A bipartisan bill, S.B. 201 featured the interests of the environmental community and was developed with input from the Ocean Conservancy (Schubel and Monroe, 2008) and supported by 32 local and national environmental, fishing, and other groups (HCNR, 2007; Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (SCCST), 2006b).
While S.B. 201 translated policy ideas about precautionary offshore aquaculture regulation into “the toughest standards anywhere in the country” (California state senator Joe Simitian in Scott, 2006), it simultaneously became a “template for national law” (P34). S.B. 201’s sponsor elevated the law as “a model for other states [and] for the nation” (Simitian, 2006a), while government staff called it “a very significant piece of legislation that is being looked at not only in California, but around the world” (Bartley and Showalter, 2008: 12). While transferring the core tenets of S.B. 201 to a national policy framework would be a difficult task given, for example, oceanographic and ecological variation between California and elsewhere (HCNR, 2009), the law was described as, at the very least, a “starting point” for a national policy reform (HCNR, 2009; SCCST, 2006b).
The mobility of S.B. 201 was apparent immediately. When the NOAA-sponsored National Offshore Aquaculture Act of 2005 (NOA 2005) was proposed, it was received as “madness” by some in the environmental community due to its perceived lack of “environmental standards and no real limitations on where [offshore aquaculture] facilities can be” (Food and Water Watch, 2006). While the bill called for a comprehensive policy framework under NOAA—echoing the Pew and U.S. ocean commissions—it left many environmental provisions to be determined after its passage. This flexibility was considered an inherent flaw in the bill by offshore aquaculture critics (SCCST, 2006b). In contrast, S.B. 201 includes strict environmental safeguards in its text, leaving many details of precautionary regulation without question. To remedy the situation, then-Pacific Regional Director of the Ocean Conservancy Tim Eichenberg suggested S.B. 201’s standards be directly incorporated into NOA 2005 (SCCST, 2006b). In the same U.S. Senate hearing, California Senator Barbara Boxer argued the California bill “should serve as a model” for Congress (SCCST, 2006b).
NOAA officials acknowledged stakeholders’ concerns about environmental standards and the influence of S.B. 201, vowing to “work with Congress to take a closer look at [those stakeholders’] suggestions” (SCCST, 2006a). As a result, alongside its introduction, NOA 2005’s sponsors proposed two immediate amendments: an “opt-out” clause for states that did not want offshore aquaculture adjacent to their coasts and a requirement that the Secretary of Commerce develop additional permits for environmental concerns (Marine Aquaculture Task Force (MATF), 2007). NOA 2005 expired in Congress, but its next iteration, NOA 2007, included text that directly incorporated the 2005 amendments, increased permitting transparency, and expanded environmental impact analyses and related research (Naylor et al., 2009; NOAA Aquaculture Program, 2007). NOAA described NOA 2007 as a “a cautious approach” to offshore aquaculture expansion and incorporated many recommendations of the Marine Aquaculture Task Force (NOAA Aquaculture Program, 2007), “an independent panel of leaders from scientific, policymaking, business, and conservation institutions” (Pew, 2007). Notably, many of the task force’s recommendations directly mirrored S.B. 201 (MATF, 2007). Ultimately, the director of the NOAA Aquaculture Program stated that NOA 2007 “reflect[ed] all of the provisions in California’s offshore aquaculture bill” (Rubino, 2008).
Although NOA 2007 aspired to be a precautionary bill, it still lacked many environmental rules within its text. This caused some actors to question its supposed “cautious approach,” and contributed to the bill’s failure in Congress. Like its 2005 counterpart, NOA 2007 relied on NOAA’s rulemaking process to develop regulations after its passage. This approach is not unfamiliar to NOAA as its guiding fisheries law, the MSA, includes few detailed fishing rules. Instead, it directs the Regional Fisheries Management Councils to craft fishery management plans (FMPs), and NOAA then develops and implements rules for those plans. When paralleled in NOA 2007, however, this sort of rulemaking system was criticized by a number of environmental and fishing groups, including many who supported S.B. 201. They argued that while NOA 2007 was a “slight improvement over” the 2005 bill, strong environmental and socioeconomic standards “must be provided in statutory criteria for issuing permits, and not merely addressed in a subsequent rulemaking process” (Shapson et al., 2007).
Introduced by California Congresswoman Lois Capps, the National Sustainable Offshore Aquaculture Acts of 2009 and 2011 (NSOA 2009 and 2011) sought to remedy the real and perceived failings of the NOA bills. They constituted clear attempts to transfer offshore aquaculture policy from the state to federal scale and incorporated text very closely modeled on S.B. 201 (Naylor and Leonard, 2010), such as explicit provisions for precautionary management, unlimited liability for environmental impacts, and regional Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEISs) prior to leasing. However, while the focus on environmental risk was a feasible legislative option in California, this strong precautionary approach could not gain traction at the federal level, and the bills ultimately expired in Congress. A key issue was that the bills lacked support from NOAA. Whereas, the California Fish and Game Commission—the central authority for offshore aquaculture under S.B. 201—has predominantly conservation responsibilities, NOAA has dual mandates of stewardship and seafood production (i.e., economic development, given its placement in the DOC). The NSOA bills, however, were near-incompatible with this latter mandate. Moreover, while Congresswoman Capps described S.B. 201 as “neither hostile to nor supportive of offshore aquaculture” (HCNR, 2009), earlier policy efforts like NAA 1980 and the 2004 National Ocean Action Plan specifically asked the federal government to support industry development. Consequently, many offshore aquaculture proponents and practitioners saw the NSOA bills as too stringent or even “anti-aquaculture” (O7, P23), and felt that its permit process “would tie you in knots” (P23, O23, P33) as has occurred in California post-S.B. 201. 1
The S.B. 201 case demonstrates the frictions and idiosyncrasies of policy mobility that result in variegated, localized, and at times, failed policy outcomes. NOAA’s dual stewardship and production mandates, for instance, hindered a clean translation of S.B. 201’s strict precautionary approach, while the agency’s familiarity with fisheries regulation may have contributed to its problematic insistence on leaving environmental rulemaking until after legislation. However, although S.B. 201 was never fully transferred to national law, describing its mobility as a failure overlooks its important role in shaping the national legislation strand of policy reform. One NGO informant argued, for example, that “the [NSOA 2011] was a worthwhile martyr” because even as it failed it “created a bar [that] probably shaped NOAA policies afterwards” (P31). Indeed, the S.B. 201, NOA, and NSOA processes contributed to a discursive shift toward precaution and sustainability in policy, as well as a movement away from finfish farming toward more environmentally benign shellfish operations (exemplified by NOAA’s National Shellfish Initiative, begun in 2011). Notably, this latter shift contributed to NOAA’s support of marine and offshore shellfish development in places like Washington, Massachusetts, and California—where ecological and oceanographic conditions are conducive to profitable shellfish operations—strengthening a different policy strand, that of administrative cooperation. Consequently, although S.B. 201 was never fully scaled up from California to the United States, the mobility of the law has had lasting effects on the offshore aquaculture policy assemblage.
Mobilizing regional reform? From New England to the Gulf of Mexico and back
While national legislation and S.B. 201 interacted across the nation’s East and West coasts, the Gulf of Mexico Regional Fisheries Management Council (Gulf Council) began working on its own policy mechanism for offshore aquaculture based on the interpretation that aquaculture constitutes a form of fishing. This section examines the policy moments and mobilities that contributed to the nation’s first FMP for offshore aquaculture (the Gulf Aquaculture Plan) and, in turn, reoriented the policy assemblage toward the regional strand of reform.
Frustrated with the slow pace of federal policy development, and cognizant of the potential to farm high-value finfish in its regional waters, the Gulf Council began work on the Gulf Aquaculture Plan in the early 2000s. Completed in 2009, NOAA published regulations for the Gulf Aquaculture Plan in 2014 and it went into effect in 2016, making it the first FMP to comprehensively address and enable commercial offshore aquaculture through fisheries law (i.e., the MSA). The plan allows for up to 20 farms to be permitted in federal waters over 10 years; it caps overall production to 64 million pounds annually. The Gulf Council may increase this limit if they deem it appropriate to grow the sector.
Coincident to debates around the NOA and NSOA bills, the Gulf Aquaculture Plan was considered both an alternative and a threat to the national legislation strand of policy reform. Many critics, for example, cited the Gulf Aquaculture Plan as further motivation for comprehensive and precautionary national legislation, concerned that regional management perpetuated a fractured and risky policy system. Since the Gulf Aquaculture Plan completion, NOAA has been sued by plaintiffs arguing offshore aquaculture is an environmental risk (an early case was dismissed; another recently found for the plaintiffs), raising important questions about whether NOAA has authority to regulate aquaculture through the MSA. At the same time, advocates saw the plan as a way to help realize federal policy goals surrounding offshore stewardship, food production, and economic development (Gulf Council, 2009). Although a few small aquaculture projects had previously been permitted through FMPs, the Gulf Aquaculture Plan was the most novel and expansive test of NOAA’s aquaculture authority and the regional policy approach.
Rather than beginning in the Gulf of Mexico itself, however, the roots of this test began offshore of New England over a decade earlier. Between 1988 and 1996, American Norwegian Fish Farms, Inc. (ANFFI) filed for a series of permits from the Army Corps to place a salmon aquaculture facility in the U.S. EEZ as far as 53 miles off Cape Ann, Massachusetts (Johnson and Hayes, 1993; U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), 1996). Cicin-Sain et al. (2001) aptly described the effort as “both bold and blind” in its scale, ambition, and lack of regulatory clarity and direction. ANFFI’s earliest proposals were unprecedented (Blaug, 1993) and extensive, as “the facility would preclude most other uses of the ocean, including fishing, in approximately 50 square nautical miles of the EEZ” (Johnson and Hayes, 1993: 2). The possibility for spatial conflicts, potential environmental interactions, and unclear regulatory conditions raised concerns within NOAA and among the public (Cicin-Sain et al., 2001).
The Army Corps issued ANFFI’s permit in December 1990, two years after its initial application, finding the operation would have “no significant impact on the environment” but moving its location further offshore to avoid fishing conflicts (Cicin-Sain et al., 2001: 47). However, just nine months later, the permit was withdrawn due to concerns from the U.S. Navy and a lawsuit filed by the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) of New England. The lawsuit alleged the Army Corps violated rules, laws (e.g., NEPA), and public trust obligations to issue the permit without conducting a full EIS or adequately considering the input of the public and agencies like the Coast Guard, NOAA, and the EPA (Cicin-Sain et al., 2001). The EPA called the project a “large experiment without controls” (Bangor Daily News, 1992), while the New England Fishery Management Council expressed concerns over fisheries conflicts and the privatization of public waters (Cicin-Sain et al., 2001). ANFFI eventually submitted scaled-down versions of its project in later years, but failed to secure permitting given concerns over the structural integrity of the facilities (Cicin-Sain et al., 2001; USACE, 1996).
The ANFFI process demonstrated the difficulties of offshore aquaculture in practice and raised its profile on the national policy stage. The events precipitated the legal determination that NEPA applies to aquaculture in the U.S. EEZ (Blaug, 1993), the first close involvement of environmental stakeholders in the sector (CLF’s lawsuit), and internal work by NOAA to reassess its authority over offshore aquaculture—a significant development for the agency, though it may not have appeared so at the time. NOAA’s findings were summarized in an internal 1993 policy memo (Johnson and Hayes, 1993) that has proven critical to the agency’s ongoing interpretation of its offshore aquaculture policy authority. In short, the memo determined that aquaculture in the U.S. EEZ constitutes a fishing activity largely because the MSA’s definition of fishing includes the “harvesting of fish”: Use of the term “harvesting” is particularly significant since it adds an additional concept beyond “catching” or “taking”—harvesting connotes the gathering of a crop—which brings within the purview of the [MSA] any aquaculture facility located in the EEZ. (Johnson and Hayes, 1993: 2)
When the Gulf Council completed the Gulf Aquaculture Plan it was passed to the Administrator of NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, for approval, who took no action on the plan for one year, after which it automatically went into effect by law. This slow and unusual FMP approval process allowed NOAA to walk a fine line that maintained its legal authority over offshore aquaculture, tacitly supported the Gulf Council’s actions, but also signaled a cautious approach to developing the sector. Despite this, offshore aquaculture critics used the case to argue “NOAA can’t regulate,” while proponents used it to argue that NOAA “is just going to keep stalling, letting us just import bad fish” (P41) as it fails to reform policy in a timely manner. Ultimately, however, the Gulf Aquaculture Plan continued through rulemaking and was fully enacted in 2016.
On the one hand, development of the Gulf Aquaculture Plan was arduous, with nearly all sides of the aquaculture debate frustrated by the process and outcomes. On the other hand, the plan may serve to function as a “model for doing [offshore aquaculture] through the Council process” (P37), providing a template for regional reform as it is translated elsewhere. Furthermore, the effects of the Gulf Aquaculture Plan case have been felt beyond the regional strand and the Gulf of Mexico itself, as it developed in conversation with the NOA and NSOA proposals, and ultimately reached back to New England and local efforts toward administrative cooperation. In response to the Gulf Aquaculture Plan and its surrounding controversy, NOAA conducted a multiyear reassessment of the agency’s role in aquaculture that resulted in the 2011 NOAA and DOC marine aquaculture policy statements, the promotion of its Aquaculture Program to a line office, and the placement of aquaculture coordinators throughout the agency’s regional offices. This provided the opportunity for the New England office to support permitting an offshore mussel farm off Cape Ann, Massachusetts—only a few dozen miles from ANFFI’s proposals—helping to streamline the administrative cooperation strand of policy reform. From an offshore salmon plan in New England, to regional fisheries management in the Gulf of Mexico, and back to New England mussel farming, we can see the dual relational and territorial nature of the offshore aquaculture policy assemblage as policy ideas, lessons, and outcomes were recontextualized in new spaces, at different times, and through different institutional arrangements.
Discussion and conclusions
This article examines the development of U.S. offshore aquaculture policy and governance through the lens of assemblage and mobility. I first characterize the policy assemblage and explain the three intertwined strands of policy reform that have taken hold and influenced policy, regulatory, and governance development. I then turn to two specific cases of policy mobility, and show not only how policy models and ideas traveled across U.S. geographies, but also across time and institutional scales, shifting and remaking the assemblage through these movements. The unsettled and complex nature of U.S. offshore aquaculture governance (and of the sea itself) presents a novel case to explore the geographies of policy, particularly when compared to terrestrial and urban systems that are commonly the focus of policy assemblage and mobilities research. Whereas these systems often involve longstanding and well-developed policy frameworks, U.S. offshore aquaculture has been and continues to be in flux, lacking a “resolved” or “complete” policy assemblage—a characteristic of U.S. oceans governance writ large (Fairbanks et al., 2018). 2 Despite this, the assemblage persists in a broadly coherent way (i.e., the three strands of reform) as interested actors translate policy ideas and practices into new and different contexts, continuously reterritorializing the spaces of governance (and, ultimately, the sea). In this regard, we can see parallels between U.S. offshore aquaculture and many policy assemblages more generally, as modern governance systems are increasingly characterized by fast-moving mixtures of actors, practices, and sociomaterial settings across time, space, and scales (Peck and Theodore, 2015).
The S.B. 201 and Gulf Aquaculture Plan cases show that policy mobility is a real and important process in the domestic or subnational context. This complements a policy mobilities literature that has largely focused on transnational or global assemblages and illustrates the value of interrogating subnational policy mobility and translation, even in a globalized policy arena. Seemingly singular “national” policies, like the 2011 NOAA and DOC marine aquaculture policy statements, are “capable of realization only in particular, grounded and localized ways” (Cochrane and Ward, 2012: 6). While the U.S. offshore aquaculture policy assemblage is not isolated from global processes, key moments and mobilities were decidedly domestic affairs that flowed and changed within the federalized institutional context of the U.S. Future research should (re)consider domestic relational geographies in addition to (or apart from) those connected to “the global” in order to improve our understanding of environmental governance and policymaking across all scales.
Similarly, the article shows the inherent instability of what can appear to be hegemonic national policy processes, further problematizing ideas of essentialized or abstracted governance forms. While many federal calls for offshore aquaculture policy development and expansion were perceived by critics as manifestations of a national endeavor toward further oceans neoliberalization, in fact there were more nuanced processes at work. To paraphrase Peck and Theodore (2012: 12), rather than a singular national model for U.S. offshore aquaculture, policy was “coconstituted through the networks, and across the [seascapes], over which [it] travel[ed].” Federal government interests masked an uncertain policy assemblage that extended well beyond the present and beyond the federal government itself. Although U.S. offshore aquaculture policy remains “incomplete,” its assembled elements—including those “failed” mobilities like S.B. 201—still play powerful and essential roles in shaping modern governance. This suggests value in attending to moments of failure in policy research (cf. Lovell, 2017, 2019), which allow us to “bear witness to tensions and fractures” that are critical moments in shaping any policy assemblage (Wynne-Jones and Vetter, 2018). Partial or failed mobilities are often neglected by scholars in lieu of more successful or “complete” policy transfers, but can nevertheless be critical components of policy development as particular pieces, elements, or lessons from policies (including real or percieved policy failures) can move and circulate through their assemblages (Lovell, 2017). In this article, whether it was the incomplete, but meaningful, translation of California’s precautionary aquaculture standards into national policy discussions, ANFFI unexpectedly laying the groundwork for NOAA’s regulatory authority and the Gulf Aquaculture Plan or both cases reconnecting NOAA to local aquaculture interests and offshore shellfish development, the U.S. offshore aquaculture policy assemblage persisted in a heterogeneous and dynamic form.
Lastly, I argue that attending to the sociomateriality of policy (Prince, 2012) requires attention to both the social and institutional contexts of oceans governance, as well as to the materality of ocean spaces and resources themselves. In the cases presented in this paper, we can see how the interactions of offshore geographies, ecologies, and institutions shaped policy, in addition to the circulating texts, discourses, and actors within the halls of NOAA and elsewhere. Alongside other policy and institutional motivations, the Gulf Council sought an FMP, for example, because Gulf of Mexico waters are suitable for high-value finfish—including those already considered federally managed fisheries. In contrast, mussels emerged as a popular offshore species in the cold waters of New England (and more recently, California), but because they are not a federally managed fishery (and hence not easily conducive for a regional FMP), actors in those spaces engaged the administrative cooperation strand of reform to pursue permitting and policy development. These processes illustrate the sociomaterality of assembled elements and oceanic conditions in shaping local policy and place (cf. McCann and Ward, 2010).
I contend that the oceans context offers scholars excellent cases with which to study the complexities and mobilities of policy and governance. In particular, the oceans present opportunities to bridge those literatures on policy assemblage and mobility with research on relational geographies and socionatural assemblages more broadly, the latter of which carefully considers the non-human components of human-environment systems (Bear, 2013; Steinberg and Peters, 2015). Given the relatively new and rapid proliferation of global oceans governance processes, policy models are being readily moved and translated across contexts, through trans- and subnational networks, and even from terrestrial systems, with mixed success. These mobilities are emergent in areas ranging from marine spatial planning, to marine protected areas, to payments for ecosystem services (Campbell et al., 2016), while the mobilities of species and markets offer compelling new areas of research (e.g., Bear, 2013; Havice, 2018). Even at the subnational scale, as this article demonstrates, the oceans offer diverse spaces, places, and policy problems in need of critical geographic and policy scholarship. These investigations will not only advance our understanding of oceans systems, but also provide insights into assemblage, mobilities, and governance more broadly across the land-sea divide.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all of the research participants for sharing their time and thoughts and for the support of the NOAA Fisheries Office of Aquaculture during the research process. This article received helpful comments from Lisa Campbell, Michael Orbach, Xavier Basurto, Jennifer Silver, and two anonymous reviewers.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was provided by the Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy and the U.S. National Science Foundation (award no. 1155299).