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and ideas upon which sustainability is based flow through institutional settings. For example,

AMCS draws on information from the Australian government data, the Redlist of Threatened

Species, and most likely the FAO, since FAO is the global body which gathers information

on fisheries worldwide. FAO collate data, assess that data and set standards for fishing, which

are the basis for many sustainability programs. There are also numerous regional bodies such

as ICCAT, which collect and measure data and set specific fishery quota based on stock

assessment. These practices are grounded in the notion of a baseline, which as marine

biologist Daniel Pauly (1995) points out is always a shifting baseline, leading to the setting of

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new sustainability norms . Sustainability materialises in the form of devices such as the

Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide app or a fish-tag used to track and collect data on the

stock. These devices differ in their user contexts (i.e. consumers as opposed to scientists and

fishing industry) but nonetheless function within the same sustainability assemblage.

Sustainability manifests in fishery policy and UN documents through terms such as

“maximum sustainable yield”, “sustainable catch” and “sustainable management”. As I will

cover in the next chapter, sustainability has local articulations in fishing communities and it

can be a point of conflict among diverse groups, involving diverse concerns and ways of

caring.

Sustainability is what Raymond Williams would call a “keyword”: a site of struggle,

where meaning is not arbitrary nor is it ahistorical (1983). Keywords are contested terms,

loaded with values and deeply connected to a cultural context (Williams 1983, p. 22). Yet for

Williams (1983, p.22) language does not simply reflect a cultural context, rather:

…social and historical processes occur within language, in ways which indicate
how integral the problem of meanings and of relationships really are. New kinds
of relationships, but also new ways of seeing existing relationships, appear in
language in a variety of ways: the invention of new terms (capitalism); in the
adaptation and alteration (indeed at times reversal) of older terms (society or
individual); in extension (interest) or transfer (exploitation).

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