Abstract:
This thesis is about Maori fishers. It examines the processes that led to the situation where Maori small-scale fishers are currently debarred from earning a livelihood from their work as a result of the progressive delegitimisation and criminalisation of "customary fishing". I argue that this was made possible by legislating for the difference between commercial and non-commercial fishing in a way that denies their essential integration in the practices of small-scale fishers across time and space. I have drawn on the analyses of expert researchers who investigated issues related to the tragedy of the commons thesis and the propositions of formal fisheries management science. Writers who developed and elaborated the concepts of the moral economy, the informal economy, petty commodity production and aboriginal title were utilised to throw light on the issues of central concern to this thesis. The major themes pursued are the denial of Maori property rights; the imposition of the institutions of private 'property; the market mechanism as it applies to fishing, the relationships between the legal and political systems, the designation of culture and tradition as static and/or antiquated and the resistance to this categorisation. Although this thesis is based on the Maori experience of fishing there is no claim that the regulation and organisation of New Zealand fisheries is unique, indeed it is likely that the situation in New Zealand is simply a particular manifestation of a universal phenomenon or, at least, is typical of the fate of fisheries in societies which have transferred the economic steering mechanisms to the free play of market forces.