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Luigi fervently expresses the unfair treatment of the tonnara and the need to revise the

European regulations and quota. He also points to the precarious situation of the tonnara

when he states that they just got by in some years. Furthermore, Luigi expresses his

frustrations operating under complex regulatory bureaucracy. In Italy regulation and

monitoring exists at the level of the local council and local coast guards; then at the regional,

national and international level, where there are also scientific observers. This is not to

mention further involvement at the level of the EU or UN. They are all here, said Luigi:

…just to watch what I am doing…I know that the fish under 30kg are useless to
me. These controllers come, what are they here to control, they cannot even tie
their own shoelace. (L Biggio 2013, pers. comm. 18 June).

With the introduction of scientific observers and local guards, the figure of the expert

has been reconfigured. Clearly, it is a concern for Luigi as to who has the authority to set

management guidelines and to control these. This also raises the issue of knowledge

production – who has the authority to produce official knowledge surrounding tuna stocks – a

topic I will continue to analyse in the next chapter. This is not to say that the knowledge

informing decisions of the rais over activities, such as when to put nets out or reading signs

of the weather, has been forsaken. Rather, as Gísli Pálsson (1991, pp. 145-146) has argued in

relation to fishery management, there is a relatively new knowledge hierarchy, which places a

significant focus on the notion of expert knowledge in the form of the marine biologists, or in

the case of tuna fisheries, scientific observers who are part of regulatory bodies and regimes.

As I will explore in the next chapter, these changes in knowledge hierarchies raise questions

about the place for accumulated fisher knowledge and stewardship practices.

The quota is also a point of tension in relation to the debates over stock assessment. I

have already mentioned that there are different opinions among marine biologists and

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