Resisting the corporate restructuring of the inshore Atlantic fisheries : mobilization for a coastal community-oriented alternative

This thesis explores the developing coastal communities response to the state-led corporate restructuring of the inshore Atlantic fisheries, focusing ultimately on women's active mobilization of that response in Nova Scotia. This thesis first critically examines some of the choices made by federal policy-makers in the name of corporate capitalist 'efficiency', the alternatives they rejected, in the development of fisheries policy, and the detrimental impact of those state policies on fishing families and on coastal communities. By means of participant-observation, this thesis then outlines the process of a social movement as it is developing in reaction to current federal policies in order to counteract the devastation of the effect of policies on coastal communities and fishing families. The central argument is that state-led corporate restructuring of the inshore Atlantic fisheries is neither socially viable nor inevitable as indicated in the rising programmatic response within coastal communities in Nova Scotia led by the active and powerful participation of both men and women in the inshore fisheries.