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chapter one. The idea of a social context to an environmental problem is somewhat absurd.

This is because the very framing of an environmental problem and the solutions presented are

thoroughly socio-material. Such an approach dislodges the idea of social order and replaces it

with the idea of social ordering (Bennett & Joyce 2010, p. 6). Thus the environmental

ordering that I mentioned in the introduction is also a social ordering. The social is performed

through statements, objects, market devices, and activities relating to sustainability and the

sea, fishing and fish. These collective social practices and materials form a sustainability

discourse, which demarcates the way sustainability itself is understood and the kinds of

material practices that are possible. This builds the picture of sustainability as more than a

solution to environmental problems but as a powerful discursive practice that defines those

problems and delimits ways of responding to them. Discursive practices of sustainability are

produced by and are part of an assembly of ideas (sustainability, nature, conservation, capital

growth), institutions (UN, environmental authorities, NGOs, certification groups), documents

(certificates, licences, reports), technologies, devices, data and subjects that participate in

environmental/social ordering.

There is a final point to make about productive power, which I return to in concluding

this chapter. What we are essentially discussing here is power, the power to limit and define

the terms of sustainability. For Foucault, power is not seen as located in the hands of one or

even several groups, which is then exercised by individuals. Indeed Foucault’s work moved

away from the individual subject or State that enforces control to a “productive” kind of

power (Epstein 2008, p. 3; Bove` 1995, p. 54). While there are instances of physical brute

power, more often than not power operates through discourses to define what is right and

what is true at any given time. ‘What makes power so powerful is that it does not just come

from one source, but from many’ (Probyn, 2014a, p. 5). The power of discourse is to ‘limit

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