Browsing by Author "García Lozano, A"

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    Problemáticas: Multi-scalar, affective and performative politics of collective action among fishing cooperatives in Mexico
    (Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space) García Lozano, A; Méndez-Medina, C; Basurto, X; Tercero Tovar, M
    The world’s fisheries face complex and high-stakes governance problems that increasingly require mobilizing diverse collectives of governance actors. How fishers and fishing organizations understand and articulate governance problems has implications for how they engage with governance institutions and the kinds of collective action they enact. In Mexico, cooperatives are a major form of organization for small-scale fishers. Fishing cooperatives form regional organizations (federations), which in turn form national organizations (confederations). These are nested or multi-scalar organizations that represent fishers’ interests and negotiate with other governance actors. Drawing on longitudinal data from assemblies of a national organization (2016–2019) – which represents more than 30,000 fishers in Mexico organized in about 300 cooperatives – as well as regional meetings involving federations and cooperatives, this study examines how cooperativist fishers in Mexico articulate problems in the governance of fisheries and to what effect. More specifically, the paper builds on scholarship about the performativity of collective action to examine the strategic discursive and affective practices through which fishers engage with major governance problems and the implications for collective action. Through the politics of multi-level cooperative institutions, specific issues are prioritized as leaders of fishers’ organizations translate diverse local-regional concerns to advance the interests of the sector at the national level. Using examples of (1) conflicts surrounding environmental conservation in the Gulf of California and (2) legacies of privatization and the decline of cooperatives in shrimp fisheries, the analysis demonstrates how discourses and affects are incorporated into specific storylines and mobilized in political spaces. Cooperativist fishers become contingently aligned along these storylines, which shapes the translation of local-regional concerns into national priorities, giving rise to a multi-scalar performative politics of collective action.
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    Weaving governance narratives: discourses of climate change, cooperatives, and small-scale fisheries in Mexico
    (Maritime Studies, 2019-04-01) García Lozano, A; Smith, H; Basurto, X
    © 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature. In the coming decades, accelerating processes of climate change are expected to impact the world’s fisheries. These changes will likely exacerbate ongoing challenges in the governance of small-scale fisheries, which play a significant role in supporting livelihoods and food security throughout the world. Among fishers in Mexico, the perceived impacts of climate change on coastal fisheries are increasingly salient. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the realities of climate change and other socio-environmental phenomena are discursively co-produced by fishers and government actors in a distinct type of political arena: the general assemblies of federated fishing cooperatives. Fishing cooperatives in Mexico organize into regional-level federations, which in turn form national-level confederations. Confederations are therefore multi-level, nested organizations for collective action and political representation. Here, we examine the interactions between fishers and federal government officials in the 2016 general assembly of one confederation, which represents 25 federations with 338 cooperatives. The general assembly of the confederation serves as a political space for open democratic participation among members and, in this case, discussions between fishers and government representatives. The discourses employed by fishers and government actors reveal tensions about the role of the state, the purpose of scientific knowledge in resource management, and the nature of the cooperative small-scale fishing sector. Insights from this case are used to advance discussions about the value of examining discursive practices to gain insights about fisheries policy, through a critical discussion of the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework. We theorize discursive practices as part of politicized performances that coalitions of actors use to express policy preferences and weave together governance narratives, which are useful for understanding positions and broader debates at the national level.