Globalising food and the rise of the privatising environmental governance: The case of industrial aquaculture

The paper examines environmental certification regimes in global aquaculture as an example of ecological modernisation approach (EMA). The key thrust of EMA is to address environmental problems facing the planet by shaping or further modernising, and not by radically changing or altering, capitalism through environmental principles. It is based on a premise that capitalism is a system flexible enough to permit movement in the direction of sustainable capitalism. As part of this movement, recent years have witnessed a proliferation of environmental certification regimes in the global agro-food system – a trend often characterised as privatising environmental governance – emerged largely because of the rise of consumer sovereignty and neoliberal push for environmental and social quality in food production and processing. Based on a robust analysis of the global aquaculture, the paper argues that the environmental certification regimes privilege some actors, species, and cultures while marginalising others. While the fundamental tenet of EMA is to shape capitalism by ecological principles, I argue instead that through environmental certification, ecology or nature itself is largely shaped, transformed and restructured to fit into and thereby serve neoliberal global governance and accumulation in a normalised manner.

Details
Date: 19 July 2018, Thursday
Time: 18:30 to 20:00   
Venue: KL16  
           The University of Nottingham Malaysia Teaching Centre
           Level 2 Chulan Tower 3 Jalan Conlay
           50450 Kuala Lumpur   

This event is free and open to all. All are welcome. 

About the speaker: 
Md Saidul Islam, a Canadian Sociologist, is an Associate Professor (tenured) in the Division of Sociology and the Coordinator of the Environment and Sustainability Research Cluster at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU). He’s currently a Visiting Research Associate, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. He taught at York University in Canada and the College of William and Mary in the United States before moving to NTU. Dr. Islam’s key interest is globalisation focusing on some cutting edge issues of international development, global agro-food system, and environmental sustainability. He published five books, and over three dozen peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His recent co-authored article on sustainable seafood in Science journal and solo-authored book Confronting the Blue Revolution: Industrial Aquaculture and Sustainability in the Global South (University of Toronto Press, 2014) have attracted a world-wide attention. In 2015, the Canadian Sociological Association (CSA) awarded him the Early Investigator Award/ Prix jeune chercheur that translates into the top emerging sociologist of the year.