Innovation or ‘Inventions’? The conflict between latent assumptions in marine aquaculture and local fishery

Abstract

Recent European policy highlights the need to promote local fishery and aquaculture by means of innovation and joint participation in fishery management as one of the keys to achieve the sustainability of our seas. However, the implicit assumptions held by the actors in the two main groups involved – innovators (scientists, businessmen and administration managers) and local fishermen – can complicate, perhaps even render impossible, mutual understanding and co-operation. A qualitative analysis of interviews with members of both groups in the Valencian Community (Spain) reveals those latent assumptions and their impact on the respective practices. The analysis shows that the innovation narrative in which one group is based and the inventions narrative used by the other one are rooted in two dramatically different, or even antagonistic, collective worldviews. Any environmental policy that implies these groups should take into account these strong discords.

Keywords

Local fishery aquaculture innovation inventions local knowledge

1. Introduction

The new Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) of the European Union (EU) highlights for the first time the need to promote marine aquaculture and local fishery through innovation and local participation. This regulation corroborates the capacity to resolve the economic, food and environmental problems faced by humanity that many documents and official institutions attribute to the techno-scientific innovation that is taking place in aquaculture (European Commission No 1224, 2009; Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), 2012, 2015). The discourse about this activity speaks in terms of efficiency (Schreiber et al., 2003) and economy (Rivera, 2007; Ryan, 2009) in order to justify an industrial pattern of food production that started to spread more than 50 years ago within the agriculture and livestock fields, with the so-called ‘Green revolution’, and which now intends to do the same within the marine environment (Wolowicz, 2005). Aquaculture symbolizes a ‘blue revolution’, the ‘latest process to domesticate the sea, the transition from hunting to the farm’ (Natale et al., 2013: 205).

At the same time, fishery’s need to innovate in the search for a new, more sustainable pattern of exploitation and, to that end, to give artisanal fishermen a leading role (European Parliament, 2012; FAO, 2015) is also taken into account. The emphasis placed by much research on the environmental crisis, together with the complexity and uncertainty surrounding marine ecosystems, have highlighted the potential value that traditional knowledge of fishing can contribute to the ecological balance of the coast. While the responsibility for over-exploiting the sea has generally been attributed to fishery, in more localized forms of fishing a resilient way of life is starting to be visible which is able to adapt to the environmental changes that are affecting the marine context worldwide (Berkes and Ross, 2013). Therefore, many authors consider that it is increasingly necessary to construct mixed models (scientific–traditional) for the sustainable and equal management both of fishery (German, 2010; Mackinson, 2001) and aquaculture (Felt, 2008; Krause et al., 2015; Young and Matthews, 2007).

However, combining both objectives could become a difficult task to achieve. Several authors warn us about the fact that this relationship is being embodied worldwide in the evolution of the two activities in opposite directions (Natale et al., 2013; Wiber et al., 2012), while aquaculture and large-scale fishing are growing, traditional and small-scale fishing are decreasing, showing that there is an interdependent, almost substitutive, dynamic between them.

This article’s aim is to investigate the possibilities of convergence and co-operation between the two activities, from the analysis of how actors perceive the elements involved in innovation and its practical implementations. Therefore, we have started with a theoretical approach to innovation as a controversial discourse to focus later on the methodology of our research. It is based on a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted in Valencian Community (Spain), one of the most representative regions in terms of aquaculture growth along with local fishery. After that, we will compare the different narratives and assumptions emerging from marine aquaculture and traditional fishing. Finally, we present the main conclusions.

2. Innovation as a controversial discursive issue

Innovation is an idea which is particularly bound to the phenomenon of the growth of aquaculture. The recognition of the important role of innovation in this activity is so great that it seems that they have never lived apart, although this terminology has really only recently been introduced with the impetus of techno-scientific models (Hicks, 2009). Its presence, however, is not restricted to this area but extends as one of the most representative discourses of the twenty-first century (Sádava, 2008).

The meaning of the discourse of innovation is determined by the uncertainties and controversies surrounding its definition. Because of the range of meanings regarding its semantic root (novelty), innovation has been described as a ‘catch-all term’ (Godin, 2008; Gurrutxaga, 2011). A quality that, according to some authors, paradoxically contributes to a very specific process of definition. While innovation is an ‘empty signifier’, it ends up being filled by the premises of the hegemonic actors (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) which use it to legitimize the new capitalism conditions that are favourable to them (Alonso and Fernández Rodríguez, 2011; Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002). For this reason, innovation is even considered to have become a fetish usually designed to foster changes at the service of industry and governments (Godin, 2012).

This discursive usage is well-reflected in current science and technology policies, but also in many others that have emerged as a result of the international crisis. The strong presence of innovation within policies can be largely attributed to the influence that evolutionary economic theories, also called neo-Schumpeterian, have exerted on them (Godin, 2008; Gudeman, 2010). In accordance with such theories, scientific knowledge – technology, in particular – becomes one of the most determining endogenous elements of the system in the race to achieve long-term progress. The relationships that some actors and institutions establish around this knowledge are likewise highlighted by their ability to promote changes aimed at achieving this target. One example is the very famous systemic combinations between administration, university and industry, which different theoretical constructs of the literature on innovation refer to as the system of innovation or the Triple Helix (Amir and Nugroho, 2013; Etzkowitz, 2008; Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff, 2000; Freeman, 1984).

It seems then that in the most official version of the discourse of innovation, certain social positions and certain types of knowledge (techno-scientific) play a special role. It is these, intertwined, that have the most legitimacy for being able to contribute to a development which is usually understood in economic terms. The exclusion that this involves of other actors, knowledge and, in general, other equally legitimate ways of understanding innovation and its aims, has been condemned by many reputed international academics.

As Gudeman (2010) warns, even though new theories based on Schumpeter have a worldwide influence on the making of many policies, it may be considered that they really represent a very special and subjective perspective. They mention ‘innovative ideas’ and ‘creative changes’ as if they were historically unknown and characteristic of few social groups. However, for this author, nothing seems to indicate that the majority of local communities had not used this creativity, although perhaps linked to other concepts of change and to smaller-scale economies.

Traditional know-how on which they are based is not tied to constant imitation; quite the opposite, it is renewed permanently. It has not only produced decisive inventions that survive into the present (the wheel, the plough, seed selection and fishing gear) but – unlike innovation – its contextual knowledge and its way of communicating it – mainly and necessarily orally – prevents the creation of a canon that could homogenize their practices, forcing the adoption of variants depending on different moments and situations (Barkin et al., 2009; Lévi-Strauss, 1962). Because of this practical and highly local character, it sometimes becomes an obstacle to print standardized guidelines of innovative change (Van Der Ploeg, 1993). Generally, the strategy to overcome this obstacle is to observe local people as if they have no discourses. Although it is precisely in such discourses where the nature of their everyday initiatives are reflected, many times with the explicit objective to escape the transformations that are intended to be imposed (De Certeau, 1990).

Following a similar line, and from the sociology of science, authors like Callon, Wynne or Jasanoff highlight the need for European policies to appreciate the variety of existing forms of knowledge and innovation forms. In their opinion, presenting innovation discourse in a univocal way and not attending to this variety has damaging effects on those who are left out and also on the society as a whole (Felt et al., 2007). As, after all, it means uncritically evaluating the consequences that could be generated, while underestimating the potential contributions from agents and knowledge that innovate in a different way, thereby solving many social problems (Wynne, 2005). Both the aforementioned controversies and other controversies surrounding innovation are in general related to the scant consideration the concept of innovation and its practices give to different social aspects (Stirling, 2008). This is reflected in the attempt that academic literature has made to reformulate it and improve its deficiencies. The concepts of ‘inclusive innovation’ (Cozzens and Sutz, 2014), ‘hidden innovation’ (NESTA, 2007), ‘frugal innovation’ (Prahalad, 2006), ‘jugaad innovation’ (Radjou et al., 2012), ‘grass-roots innovation’ (Gupta et al., 2003), ‘social innovation’ (Mulgan, 2006) and ‘responsible innovation’ (Von Schomberg, 2013), among others, are trying to fill the gaps that until now have been left by policies linked to this famous term.

However, the policies of some Member States, such as Spain, are using a rhetoric, which is still observed as a reduced conception of innovation (Echeverría, 2013). Moreover, it could be a controversial discursive issue too, as we will see in our analysis, in the discourses of some of their protagonists.

3. Methodology

Spain is the largest aquaculture producer within the EU (with approximately 271.963 t.), and the Valencian Community, joint to Murcia, is the region that has generated most marine fish in 2014 ‘in the name of innovation’ (Martínez-Novo, 2015). Furthermore, in the harbours of the Valencian Community, aquaculture is developed very close to another important activity such as local fishing (small-scale fishery) which comprises at least more than 50% of the fishing fleet. While it is true that, in general, the number of boats and catches over the last 20 years follows a decreasing trend – even more so if compared with the growth of aquaculture production – in terms of employment, small-scale fishing alone exceeds by 40% of the working capacity of marine aquaculture (Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente (MAGRAMA), 2014).

Despite the importance that both activities have within the region, the relationship between them is often tense, based on the direct testimonies that we have gathered and the news in the media which confirm it. This is why we can consider that the most representative social positions (using Bourdieu’s terminology) of innovative aquaculture and local fishing within the region delimit the field of our qualitative study.

The case of aquaculture is basically about social positions linked to current marine fish production, such as businessmen, scientists and administration managers. Accordingly, we have carried out 19 interviews with people from these three basic social positions. In the case of local fishermen, we have focused on small-scale fishermen located at the municipalities where the marine farms are set up. We have interviewed 28 fishermen from the Valencian ports of Guardamar, Santa Pola, Campello, Calpe, Gandía, Sagunto and Burriana.

The variety of fishing gear which coastal fishermen¹ use (small-scale fishing, purse seine and trawl net) determine their social positions within the community of fishermen, as there are many differences – practical, technological and in terms of capital – that separate them.² Despite the disagreements between them, many of which in fact derive from the different fishing techniques they work with, the group perceives itself as having its own identity against that of the rest of the stakeholders (Herrera-Racionero et al., 2015).

The number of interviews with any social position within each activity is not determined by statistical significance, but by the saturation point of the discourse. We confirm the representativeness of our sample when, from a number of discourses, one more does not produce new information relevant to the subject matter. Regarding the structure of all the interviews, they are based on an orientation script (semi-structured) focused on innovation. Note, however, that when applied to local fishermen, it was found that they often ignore or avoid the term because it is not part of their usual repertoire lexicon. When this happens, the interview continues from the specific terms of those traits of innovation that they do use and recognize, as do the terms ‘new’, ‘change’, ‘improvements’ or ‘inventions’.

On the collected discourses, we have performed a sociological analysis, seeking to detect the ‘implicit conceptions’ (Wynne, 2005), the a priori (Woolgar, 1988) or the ‘practical logic’ (Bourdieu, 1990) that drive their actions. Following Bakhtin’s dialogic perspective, we do not consider these conceptions in isolation. The common thread and tensions we find between the conceptions of all discourses give rise to various ‘narrative configurations’ (Conde, 2010), ‘narrative structures’ (Keller, 2005) or what English literature calls as ‘story lines’. In the case of our research, and according to the set target, we have detected two ideal types of setting: narration of innovation in aquaculture (N1) and narration of local fishing (N2).

Of particular interest for our analysis are the rhetorical records, such as metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980; Lizcano, 1999), which allow a privileged access to the assumptions that interviewees take for granted and, therefore, lay the foundations and the structure for the most explicit and obvious aspects of their discourse.

We shall see below the different features of these narrative configurations in relation to innovation, serving us to do so, the analysis of the most representative samples of discursive interviews.

4. Aquaculture, fishermen and the invention of innovation

When undertaking the analysis of the discourse of innovation, the first thing which attracts attention is the fact that, while this term is part of the common vocabulary of scientists, managers and businessmen linked to aquaculture (N1), it does not appear at all in that of the local fishermen (N2).

Among the former, that condition of empty or floating signifier that we have mentioned above is assumed unequivocally:

Something that is an academic concept has been bought as if really existed, like the health system or the university system. Moreover, when the concept of innovation has been widened until becoming a talisman – innovate or die – innovation is the solution. Thus we have created a fantasy world where it is very difficult to know what we are talking about. (S-15)

Innovation is a construct that was invented to facilitate understanding (…). However, this construct has not proved useless. Rather, this construct has made possible a considerable number of policies during the last three decades which have, let’s say, contributed to create and postulate that system that did not exist. (B-16)

Thus, we are dealing with a construct, a fiction. Not any fiction, but a fiction that is able to ‘create a fantasy world’, a fiction with special powers: a fetish, ‘a talisman’. As such, it can lead to benefits or misfortunes: ‘Innovation might not … always be successful. Innovation can lead you to succeed or fail’ (S-6).

Despite this fictitious and ambiguous nature, innovation is constantly mentioned in relation to marine aquaculture, and it is even assumed to be consubstantial with it: ‘innovation is in fashion’, ‘everything seems to have to rotate round its policies’ (M-13), ‘innovation is crucial for any process, and even more for aquaculture that has necessarily been a process with some level of innovation’ (S-6). The need to innovate is such that it is seen as a destination, the only possible way: ‘innovate or die’ (S-15). There is no alternative: ‘There is a new product [aquaculture fish] in the market that in the end has to be and will be accepted’ (S-3).

But this strongly symbolic nature of innovation, far from being an obstacle for its acceptance and spread, will be precisely what will allow – as we shall see – the fulfillment of functions of binding and universalizing aspiration which is fundamental to N1 discourse. This symbolic device’s capacity for abstract universalization emanates from what has now been achieved by the three categories that merge into it: science, business and administration. Facing the randomness, heterogeneity and unpredictability of fishing, these three components of innovation will allow widespread forecasting, control and homogeneity:

Fishing, one day we might get gilthead bream from a boat, another day we might get sea bass, another day a bit mixed, another day whatever. [Aquaculture] is a very different business, because you have your cages, you control them, you know the size of your catches, the fish arrive at the right time for the company, it is processed, packed, labelled and sent to the market points. Therefore there is homogeneity in size, there is homogeneity in species. (S-1)

Although the narrative of aquaculture is about a basic and necessary concept and practice, for local fishermen (N2) innovation is not even a known term. When we ask a question including this word, either they answer with a new question ‘Innovation? In what sense’? (Small-Scale-6) or they answer thinking that we refer to ‘devices’, ‘machines’ or, as they sometimes say, ‘inventions’ (Small-Scale-3).

Innovation is not as well-known nor quotidian for them, it is not part of the popular imagination which some authors believe is widely spread and assumed to be ‘everybody’s vocabulary’ (Godin, 2008: 5). The concept of innovation is a construct that, as our aquaculture interviewees have recognized, has its roots in that non-place of theory and, therefore, it has not been taken up in the common language of local fishing. That conceptual invention – called ‘innovation’, that this itself represents – is not applied by N2, although the specific technological inventions that they have in their boats are indeed applied – with a greater or lesser degree of resistance.

Nevertheless, this conceptual lack on the part of N2 has not impeded that, since the 1970s, many anthropological studies about fisheries have referred in a very natural way to the fishermen’s processes of innovation and their resistances (Diegues, 2005; Herrera-Racionero et al., 2015), associating innovation with technological changes, but avoiding this discursive absence and their implications. It neither has been considered by literature on social issues of science and technology in general, that despite his criticism of ‘innovation’ no longer use the term, although claiming the need to open it to greater participation (Stirling, 2008; Von Schomberg, 2013).

However, it is worth noting that the interviewed fishermen, when speaking about inventions, disregard – unlike the promoters of innovation – the intention of projecting them towards any universality (De Certeau 1990), towards considering them as a general remedy for ‘any process’ and in any place, as if they were something about which ‘everything seems to have to gravitate’. Which is not surprising as that intention of standardization is precisely what is most commonly condemned by the fishermen. They constantly tell us about multiple inventions (‘another invention’!), inventions that are in general ‘wrong’ because they ignore the differences of each particular situation:

We are not all the same, for example, in the North … there is a kind of sea. There is a type of boats, boats going to Gran Sol, all that is a way of fishing … we are not the same in the bay. It is good that some safety rules are requested (…) but you cannot compare such a boat. For small boats, then put a life raft for 6, but not for 10, put a radio beacon but not a worldwide one, as I am not going outside of Valencia. And they are always the same for everyone, because it is always governed by tonnage or GTs, they do not take fishing into account; as subsidies do: from such to such, so much. It’s all about measurement, to stop the temporary fishing ban, the same, it’s all about measurement. (Small-Scale-9)

For him, rules that impose the innovations that he mentions damage quality in the name of quantity (‘it’s all about measurement’) and disregard the various specific situations and particular contexts: ways of fishing, types of sea, vessels … Innovations ‘are always the same for everyone’ but ‘we are not all the same’. In contrast to the aspiration of standardization linked to innovations, the inventions of the fishermen adapt to this mass of small differences of which, according to them, innovation is unaware.

The driving force of ‘aquaculture vessel’

If the three constituent agencies of innovation (business, science and management) drive the aspiration to universalize their concepts, objectives, methods and products, the strongly symbolic status that this floating signifier comes to acquire will end up merging those agencies together so as to make them almost indiscernible from each other:

Boundaries between the public and the private sector, between the innovator, the scientist and the businessman, these borders are increasingly vague. I mean that the problem of these labels, these sentences don’t mean anything in the end, just because they don’t define anything in the end … (M-17)

The open or empty nature of the signifier ‘innovation’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985), precisely because it does not define anything, makes it a symbolic device that allows the dilution of the borders between heterogeneous elements (Sperber, 1979) or even – in Jungian terms – combine opposing materials while keeping a dynamic balance between them. Although for Merton, father of the sociology of science, this one was characterized by its disinterest, now innovation allows – and drives – the interests of science to converge with those of businesses. Thanks to that, rather than private they seem to be of the whole society (Alonso and Fernández Rodríguez, 2011):

Not only it is necessary to be excellent in patenting and publishing, but it is necessary to be excellent in turning business into knowledge … I mean, knowledge into business. (S-15)

This marine biologist’s slip is significant: business and knowledge, market and science, are for him so interchangeable that he doubts the direction of the transformation from one to another to which he wanted to refer. We had already listened to him referring to innovation as an academic concept that ‘has been bought’ as if it really existed. And it is not less meaningful to find a similar mix-up coming from an administration officer:

When we resolve to create a Spanish strategy we focus on a concept, which is how to transfer ideas … or turn market ideas into innovation, into knowledge. (M-14)

At the beginning of his stammering speech, ‘ideas’ and ‘market ideas’ are equal. And he carries on by stating that his purpose is to turn them into knowledge, which really seems to be nonsense. Later on, once he gets over the initial confusion and, with his speech under control, he is able to clearly express his intention:

We are going to change and we change in our strategy the concept that science, at least public science, paid for with public money, is carried out only according to the criteria of the researchers themselves, we are going to turn it around and speak in the strategy about technological and business leadership. (M-14)

While he specifies that the merging of science and the market has to be done by transferring to the market the autonomy and leadership that previously belonged to scientists, he also includes within this hybrid, in passing, ‘science paid for with public money’, which is to say that managed by the state administration (the other science, that which is privately financed, is assumed to be included already). Thereby, the three fundamental instances precipitate around an innovation helix, which dilutes the important differences that should continue to maintain its actors (Elzinga, 2004). Although some still exist among them, what is important is that the expressive and performative function of innovation discourse generates a trend that makes them disappear. And what seemed to begin as a construct or fiction, it ends up being perceived as the driver of a natural process:

In California … there has not been a plan for it [innovation] to grow, there has not been a State intervention; there has been a spontaneous sprouting of resource capacity. (M-10)

Innovation is, then, a living organism, which can both ‘grow’ in the fertilized ground of state planning and ‘spontaneously sprout’ in the fields of free business. Actors from N1 likewise accept that this vitality typical of innovation also vitalizes their own integral elements, which are the market and techno-science. They also change in an autonomous and synchronized way, almost as if they were independent living beings or, to put it better, interdependent. Within economic language, it is already an almost unnoticed metaphor (Lizcano, 2009) that the economy and its components (companies, indicators and markets …) behave and grow as any other living being. Therefore, it is not strange that our interviewees repeat this biologistic language when they refer to business: aquaculture companies are like ‘seeds in a field’ or ‘business incubators’. They need only to get the necessary ‘economic watering’ to deploy their vitality in an autonomous way, that ‘innovative ability’ which is able to give ‘its fruit’.

This use of biological metaphors in N1 interviewees’ references to companies or the market is very similar to the naturalization they also apply to the processes of techno-science. Also the assumed naturalness of its development means that it holds a high degree of autonomy. Thus, aquaculture can ‘develop’ fish with certain features or consider itself to be a source of knowledge that ‘emanates from’ certain institutions:

I don’t know if knowledge emanating from research centres, public research institutions, and universities has been able to put progress on the right path. It’s true that this research can be far ahead of what the market needs but, well, science has to do that, it has to do vanguard things and then, when the market matures, it will be able to improve it. (S-6)

Here, we observe a peculiarity, its ‘development’ is considered to be partly dependent upon the ‘maturity’ level of other areas. The collected discourses assume that science is completely carried out only when it hybridizes with the market, as progress is achievable only in this way.

To sum up, both innovation and its economic, scientific and managerial components seems to enjoy in N1 an autonomous and interconnected dynamism: that common triple helix that transfers the DNA double helix to the field of innovation. Whatever comes of it, as occurs with its new products, ‘must be accepted’ (S-3).

This ‘natural’ power attributed to innovation activity has as its necessary correlate from N1 that the know-how of the fishermen is eroded and discredited:

We face again the psychosocial problem, that is to say, one [the fisherman] has done what he has done throughout all his life. Changing, innovating is difficult, he conceives it as something that does not belong to him, beyond painting his boat, getting more power for it, or the safety of his crew, just getting some kind of subsidy for it, to make a better month. (S-6)

Unable to innovate, fishermen are thus misfits who are condemned to extinction in the race of ‘progress’. This dynamism transfers to innovation the adaptive demands of evolution while placing on the individual the responsibility to get on board with ‘progress’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2002):

The whole fishing activity missed the opportunity of getting on board aquaculture by setting up their own farms. I always suggested it and told them: look at the figures. The fishermen’s association didn’t want to; some ship-owners did. Aquaculture didn’t work in Gandía for market reasons that are not relevant now, but fishermen missed the opportunity. (S-2)

Fishermen are, therefore, the ‘losers’ in the process of ‘natural selection’ imposed by innovation. Mentioning this process through the metaphor ‘getting on board aquaculture’, while evoking the cliché of ‘the train of progress’ (which traditional farmers have already missed), has the rhetorical effect of making aquaculture resemble the ships which are familiar to fishermen: according to N1, getting into aquaculture would be for fishermen just a change of boat.

Aquaculture: a beached boat

From a very different position, fishermen take that metaphor literally: that boat, the farms that it is suggested that they ‘set up’, is a beached boat. According to N2, farms are not seen as a boat moving forward (to progress, according to N1), but as stagnation, a fixing to the floor to which the farms are attached:

We wish that all the cages there would burst, but they don’t. We want a storm to blow everything away, but they have got it all very well hooked. (Small-Scale-18)

This fisherman plays with the meaning of the verb ‘to hook’. According to him, aquaculture farmers have hooked the cages to the bottom of the sea, which prevents them from moving (in particular, it prevents them from being blown away by a storm: that of his anger), but the cages are also hooked to powers (which are alluded to through the ‘it’ pronoun) that have installed them ‘there’, against which fishermen feel powerless. The ‘aquaculture boat’ cannot lead them anywhere, neither literally nor metaphorically. And the fisherman feels powerless before it:

That [marine farms] is a load of shit, as I say, but those people have so much power in the European Union … as fishermen say ‘big fish eat little fish!’ And that’s all. (Small-Scale-18)

It is certainly true that adopting this victim role allows them to justify bad practices that they know they carry out at sea, as they consider them to be less harmful than the practices of those whom they are against. Facing the threat of power that fishermen see in the arrival of aquaculture, fishermen confer on themselves the legitimacy that comes from looking at themselves as supposed losers (Martínez-Novo, 2015).

As for the market, fishermen constantly question the naturalness of its changes. In fact, this concept is barely mentioned in the abstract. Market interactions (export and import, supply and demand and selling and buying) are always mentioned in relation to a particular place: the fish market, their local market. This way, the lack of fetishization when talking about it, compared to – as we saw – the discourse about innovation, enables a non-adaptive way of relating to it, according to what the market expects or demands. For that reason, it is common among their comments to recall different experiences, to bring to the present those features of the local market (the fish market) which today it would be possible to improve, although achieving it is becoming increasingly difficult. As a small-scale fisherman told us, there was a time in which if you were brave enough to dare to go out fishing in bad weather the price would rise: ‘Even if you caught stones they were valuable’. Not like now, ‘risking the same, we get paid as a normal day’. Now, the influence of a disembedded economy (Polanyi, 1944) has broken the local balance between supply and demand. The large supply of imports remains constant even during periods of storms, which means that the demand side barely notices the decrease within local catches (local supply) and that, as a result, effort and talent are not better paid.

As their catches are offered together with aquaculture catches in specific places such as fishmongers or the fish market, and not in a decontextualized place such as the market itself, the mass production of fish damages the fishermen: it tends to replace that which has been caught through practices that have allowed them to survive beside the sea throughout history. The following interviewee expresses this substitutive effect:

That feed, I don’t know what kind of feed it is, smells … and around the cage no fish breeds normally. We are not satisfied because the truth is that this is artificial fish and it harms our fish. Because at Christmas, gilthead bream has always cost a fortune, and now, according to the situation … although one of those is not the same, they are rounder than a wild one. The wild one, it immediately hits you, but of course, who can tell it apart? And there is a saying that says the fish harms the fish. The more there is of this fish, the less there is of the other. Who buys a kilo of that, is not buying the other. (Trawler-1)

According to the interviewee, that condensed mass of fish (‘that’: aquaculture fish) not only harms the fish approaching its cages, but also the ones that fishermen, as a community, sell to shops. When huge amounts of a single type of fish are produced, every fish becomes generic fish. Qualitative features disappear, and they seem only to be comparable quantitatively around price. Shopping possibilities, then, eventually become a zero-sum game. If there is a greater quantity of one fish, there must be a similar lesser quantity of the other: ‘the fish harms the fish’.

In the same sense that fishermen tell us about the market, they talk about techno-science. Their discourse does not accept its ‘natural’ progress. Therefore, they constantly show that they are aware of the damages generated by devices that they carry in their boats (‘these devices have provoked the sea to run out’) and of the replacement (not evolution) of knowledge which these devices produce: ‘the old men of the sea knew ten thousand times what a fisherman knows now’.

However, there is a kind of techno-science which has little effect on the autonomy of their everyday way of acting and which is better valued. The case of nets is a paradigmatic example:

Before, nets were made of cotton, then they were made of nylon, then of plastic, then of monofilaments, so they are increasingly improving. […] The first you had to wash them every day with water and soap. Otherwise, it was not possible, it lasted only a month, salt ate it, this one has a longer life and it helps you. (Small-Scale-8)

That ‘before’ that our interviewees are constantly recalling in a similar way to compare with the ‘now’, is not always a synonym of better times, although neither were they necessarily worse. In not assuming a line of progress as a necessary temporal matrix, they can adopt a critical perspective regarding techno-scientific changes: not always opposing any transformation, nor assuming every novelty as positive, as ‘progress’. When groups, communities or small-scale groups reclaim the past or the traditional, it is often because the change they face exceeds their own ability to adapt to it and control it (Diegues, 2005; Van Der Ploeg, 1993). For this reason also, fishermen make clear the importance of those technical changes that are carried out from their knowledge to improve their activity. For example, they tell us about the different improvements they carry on the gear with the aim of catching species that they have noticed growing in number or that have a higher sales price: ‘these are things … we have improved in the gear … putting more cork, a better net … or making bigger holes, to catch less, but better quality’ (Small-Scale-4).

This way of improving their own gear can be seen at the harbour. Crews observe each other, they learn from others and try out what others are doing. Thus, more or less clever variants that boost competitiveness to achieve better results are developed and delivered among the fishermen. They are their own inventions from community economies that are not without creativity. The basic difference with those generated by innovation is that they are not transferred to a great population in a standardized and often compulsory way. It is about a process of daily invention (De Certeau, 1990) which comes from the idiosyncratic ‘logics’ mentioned by fishermen (Herrera-Racionero et al., 2015: 133).

As a result, the fisherman does not expect anybody to adapt to his logic, his logic adapts to environmental and temporal conditions. These idiosyncratic ‘logics’, based on continuous dealing with the sea, and in the fishermen’s customs, do not derive their strength from their deductive ability, but from their transmission through conversation and from a conviction based on face-to-face relationship between them and on daily experience:

It is about the subject of gear that the fisherman has knowledge … I do it this way, I have seen this is better to me, and the net … the net has changed from before, or the creel. Creel … in this harbour I got it bound the other way round to the others. ‘He’s crazy! He put them the other way round!’ I put them upside down, they put them all face up. Crazy … but I’m the one who catches the most. I have my logic and … they will all end up by putting them upside down: time will tell … I see that the octopus … if you put it this way it can see the light and it sees the light coming up and it goes out, if it is upside down it doesn’t see the light any more (…) this is our thing, then you may be talk about it and … (Small-scale-4)

The ‘improving gear’ by the fisherman is his idiosyncratic way of innovation, combining personal inventiveness (‘He’s crazy! He puts them upside down’!) with collective experience (‘we have improved it’). It is not spread by mandatory regulations of universal and absolute application, but by persuasion, both rhetorical (‘You talk about it and …’) and empirical (‘they will all end by putting them upside down: time will tell …’).

N2 discourse thus show us that where N1 postulates certain abstractions (science, market, innovation and progress) as fixed, autonomous and determining entities, the fisherman places his traditions and knowledge of the sea, which is based on a daily experience, as fixed and unquestionable elements. Innovations must adapt to them and to the changes that they observe within species or at the fish market, and not the other way round. Consequently, what is perceived by N1 as an obstinate resistance to change and innovation (‘[Fishermen] have not changed at all’ – B-10) is the opposite for N2, where innovation is perceived as the inability to adapt to local contexts and to the variable conditions of the sea and fish, therefore it eventually becomes a synonym of dogmatic immobility: ‘So far, they [scientists] are the Word of God’ (Small-scale-27).

5. Conclusion

Innovation, particularly innovation in marine aquaculture, is usually presented as a substantial and necessary advance to the sustainable production of food. However, it provokes a widespread rejection by some local actors who share space in the ports and who have been providing food from the sea for centuries, the small-scale fishermen. If, as Wittgenstein proposed, a word’s meaning is found in its usage in language, in which the speakers’ ways of life is reflected, our analysis of the discourse of innovators (N1) and fishermen (N2) in the Valencian Community (Spain) shows us that the empty signifier ‘innovation’ only has meaning, discursive use, for the collective of our innovator agents (scientists, businessmen and public managers). For the local fishermen interviewees, this signifier lacks significance and does not form a part of their speech, only isolated concepts such as ‘novelty’, ‘change’, ‘improvements’ and ‘inventions’. Generally they recognize the term; however, it tends to be interpreted as a standardized transformation, or large scale changes imposed externally.

In short, it can be said that there is a radical discordance between N1 and N2. This discordance might be the result of the different – if not opposite – latent assumptions that underlie their forms of know-how. The first group discourses (N1) implicitly provide certain abstract entities (market, techno-science and progress) with an autonomy and capacity for agency that are not recognized by the second group (N2). The latter group, in turn, transfers – has always transferred – that agency and autonomy to particular objects which are perceived by the fishermen, as unique and genuine subjects: the sea, fish, local markets (fish markets), their specific experience, inventiveness and tradition.

We have also observed how each group erodes, now in a more explicit and premeditated way, the assumptions which the other one takes as its base, which allows them to describe these assumptions as mere beliefs that are groundless, if not harmful. Thus, all agency that N1 gives to market and techno-science, serves to neutralize and discredit the power and intelligence that N2 attributes to their experience, creativity and fishing traditions. And, conversely, the whole initiative and action that N2 grants to these entities, as well as enabling fishermen to legitimize their knowledge and traditional practices, reorients them towards complaint, undermining and discrediting a market, a progress and a techno-science whose power, for them, is simply coercion, as these entities are blind to the specific and ever-changing singularities of the marine world.

Considering all this, it is necessary to warn that the emphasis placed by the latest European policy (CFP 2014) on the need to promote innovation jointly in both aquaculture and local fishing through participation could lead to undesirable, if not contradictory, effects on the coasts of the Member States. This is especially true of Spain, where legislation does not seem to have sufficiently incorporated the plurality of significances that innovation involves. In this sense, not recognizing or predicting discordances and inconsistencies between the implicit collective imaginations of the groups that develop each of the two activities contributes to increasing conflict and to the disappearance of the most vulnerable local players, who could play a very important role in the socio-environmental sustainability of the coast.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by National Plan for Scientific and Technological Research and Innovation (Spanish Economy and Competitiveness Ministry). Research Project CSO2013-41972-P.

Notes

Author biographies

Rodrigo Martínez-Novo holds a PhD in Sociology and a Degree in Environmental Science. His interests span the relationship between knowledge, power and social and environmental issues in sectors such as fisheries and aquaculture.

Emmánuel Lizcano is a Professor of Sociology of knowledge in the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (Open University) of Spain, PhD in Philosophy of Science and MSc in Mathematics. His research interests are focused on scientific/local knowledge and discourse analysis.

Paloma Herrera-Racionero is a Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and Researcher at Instituto de Investigación para la Gestión Integrada de Zonas Costeras (IGIC). Her research centres around marine and coastal environment, local and indigenous knowledge and community-based resource management.

Lluís Miret-Pastor is an Economist and Professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and Researcher at IGIC. He participates in several projects related to eco-innovation, tourism, fisheries or environment.

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