Homarus Corporatus: Investigating the state-firm-resource nexus in the Canadian offshore lobster fishery

Sammanfattning: Lobster production in Nova Scotia has been expanding for three decades, and a single firm, the vertically integrated, Canadian-based seafood company Clearwater Seafoods Inc., has gained exclusive control over the offshore lobster fishery. Drawing on a Marxian theoretical framework combined with insights from critical resource geography, this thesis aims at placing the production of offshore lobster in Nova Scotia, Canada within the broader context of the capitalist relations that shape and drive it. The thesis achieves this by unveiling the historical-geographical development of the offshore lobster fishery, in particular by way of investigating the state-firm-resource nexus within this space. Using a combination of document analysis and interviews the work first examines the role of the state in creating and crafting the institutional framework of the offshore, a framework which has facilitated the concentration of control of licenses within the hands of a single company. The thesis then shifts to analyzing the various business strategies deployed by the firm Clearwater Seafoods Inc. in turning the lobster of the offshore into a productive commodity for its capital accumulation. In presenting a qualitative historical analysis of the concentration of control within a fishery, this work contributes to the robust, but small body of literature that examines capture fisheries from the lens of Marxian political economy.