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ABSTRACTThis article presents an analysis of impact evaluations in the case of Fairtrade International in order to track the political effects of metrics and measurement procedures in development practice today. Metrics or 'indicators' have long been understood to have the effect of transforming the political visions of socioeconomic change that shape development interventions into seemingly non‐contentious, technical models. The common practice among development organizations of using such metrics as evidence of apolitical, technical development outcomes has wide‐ranging implications for the field of development and for development subjects. The article explores two specific implications by detailing impact evaluations on three Fairtrade‐certified cut‐flower plantations, which Fairtrade International contracted to inform a 2014 revision of its certification standards. The authors find, first, that debates over competing visions or definitions of development became concealed in technical debates over adequate metrics and measurements; and, second, that such debates over metrics and measurement consolidated the roles of experts and expert knowledge as mediators of what development can or should be. These findings enhance prior critiques of the supposed neutrality of development metrics by illustrating empirically how the processes of defining metrics and measurement conceal and circumscribe political debates over the meaning and making of development practice.

AbstractThe dynamic and unfolding relationship between the oceans and humans underwrites a general narrative of oceans in 'crisis' and the need for new governance and regulatory frameworks to attend to it. As concerns surrounding marine space have proliferated, sovereignty, territory and property in the oceans remain imprecise and subject to controversy, presenting challenges (and opportunities) for oceans governance. This special issue employs the concept of ocean frontiers as a pivot into these concerns because of the eroding, but still frequent, portrayal of the oceans as a planetary space separate from humans and because the concept offers entry points for navigating the unfolding dimensions of ocean conservation and exploitation. Deducing from the eight contributions from the special issue, we develop four inter‐related arguments. First, while ocean frontiers pre‐exist the epistemological, jurisdictional and commodification categories that we conceptualize in this editorial introduction, we find that these categories, which may be understood as intersecting inocean regimes, play central roles in closing the spatial and socially‐constituted ocean frontier, bringing it closer to human purview. Second, the materiality of oceans – their mobile and volumetric elements ‐ influences all of these emerging and intersecting oceanic processes. Third, contributing authors have developed innovative methodological approaches to the study of the oceans, revealing oceans not as 'siteless', but multi‐sited, and demonstrating that the social sciences are well suited methodologically to bring unfolding ocean processes into view. Last but not least, drawing from the insights set out by the contributors, we argue for ongoing interdisciplinary social (and natural) science research on the oceans as they and human‐ocean relations unfold in a period of dramatic change.

This article situates seafood in the larger intersection between global environmental governance and the food system. Drawing inspiration from the food regimes approach, we trace the historical unfolding of the seafood system and its management between the 1930s and the 2010s. In doing so, we bridge global environmental politics research that has studied either the politics of fisheries management or seafood sustainability governance, and we bring seafood and the fisheries crisis into food regimes scholarship. Our findings reveal that the seafood system has remained firmly dependent on the historical institutions of national seafood production systems and, particularly, on the state-based regulatory regimes that they promulgated in support of national economic and geopolitical interests. As such, seafood systems contribute to a broader, historicized understanding of the hybrid global environmental governance of food systems in which nonstate actors depend heavily upon, and in fact call for the strengthening of, state-based institutions. Our findings reveal that the contemporary private ordering of seafood governance solidifies the centrality of state-based institutions in the struggle for "sustainable" seafood and enables the continued expansionary, volume-driven extractivist logics that produced the fisheries crisis in the first place.

The relationship among trade liberalization, the environment, and socioeconomic development is marked by controversy, though it is well accepted that in practice economic interests often trump environmental concerns and that developing countries incur a range of costs to participate in, and comply with, multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. Politics and power dynamics in the rule-making process in liberalization negotiations are often implicated for generating these outcomes. To improve on this record, and in accordance with the rise in 'market environmentalism', World Trade Organization (WTO) members and advocacy groups have turned this rhetoric on its head and pushed for 'synergy' in which a single WTO rule to discipline fisheries subsidies at once liberalizes trade, generates an environmental improvement, and supports developing country aspirations—a much fêted 'triple win'. We sketch the anatomy of the fisheries subsidies negotiations and explore how the triple win is used by blocks of states to justify different political—economic positions. This analysis sheds light on the challenges associated with seeking to use trade for the environment and for development and the dynamics that shape negotiations and the actually existing rules that emerge from the WTO.

The Western and Central Pacific Ocean (WCPO) tuna fishery is the largest and most valuable in the world. Although the International Law of the Sea granted Pacific island countries the right to exploit and manage this valuable fishery, they have been unable to prevent resource decline or to capture economic development potential from their intersections with the global tuna industry. Variants of neoliberalism identify Pacific island countries' weak institutions to explain these failings. We argue that this explanation is insufficient. As an alternative, we offer a political economy analysis of the co-evolution of fisheries regulation and the strategies of the Japanese and Taiwanese fleets (and their governments) in the region. This framing illustrates the relational, multi-scalar processes within and among states and firms that shape patterns in the sector. Our findings indicate that the combination of competitive capital accumulation strategies and inter-state power relations must be addressed to explain challenges in the WCPO tuna sector.

AbstractMarine turtles have complex life histories and make expansive migrations over their long lifetimes, often through multiple states' exclusive economic zones and areas beyond national jurisdiction. This complexity makes it difficult to "know" marine turtles and presents jurisdictional mismatches for existing state and inter‐state bodies that govern turtles. This paper examines how scientists tasked with assessing marine turtles for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species have used their scientific expertise to make marine turtles legible for governance, including by rescaling the Red List assessment process to include both global and regional levels. We find that in this rescaling project, marine turtle scientists have created two new objects of governance: spatially bounded "regional management units" and the scientists themselves, who have begun to sort themselves and their work around the new spatial units in the interest of generating progress in ocean conservation. More broadly, the story of the IUCN Red List process for sea turtles turns attention to the work of science and scientists in making oceans resources legible, and therefore governable, even when they defy the boundaries of state‐led regulatory bodies or jurisdictional spaces.