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case has the power to define cultural diversity? Where are the issues discussed, how are they

framed, and within which institutional spaces? The third dilemma concerns conflict and

hierarchies among the now reified four pillars. If we agree that the project of an integrated

model is worthwhile, and assume that there exist separate components we can call culture,

society, economy and environment, then several paradoxes arise. How would an ethic of

cultural diversity and four-pillar model of sustainability address a situation of conflict?

Conflict is deeply relevant to any integrated model of sustainability that attempts to attend to

each pillar. I will provide several examples in chapter four where diverse interests (e.g.

animal rights, species conservation, business, tradition) collide, highlighting the paradox of a

four-pillar model of sustainability.

Differences exist not only among diverse groups that gather around issues but also

among the four pillars when put into practice, creating hierarchies of concern, where often

culture, as a concept and series of practices, is compromised. For now I would like to treat

this as an opportunity to open up a space to think through the ways that culture gains a

transactional reality (Bennett 2013, p. 12) in the area of environmental governance and in the

specific fishing communities in which I undertook my fieldwork. This analysis will further

the wider goal of this thesis, which is to develop a vocabulary and theoretical framing to

articulate biocultural dimensions of conflicts and of sustainability in fishing communities.

Let us return to Bennett’s notion of the culture complex and consider the breadth of

experts and institutions that have contributed to forging a space for culture as a distinct

category and mobilising a concept of culture across a wide range of debates, policies and

practices. As I indicated in the introduction to this chapter the transactional reality of culture

is a result of, and also takes place among, diverse actors – academics, politicians,

representatives of NGOs and super governmental organisations – and their institutional

settings. These actors perform expertise in diverse situations, an example of which is the

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