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to participate in defining solutions. Instead the 2013 gathering was more of a result of

unsettled and unsettling issues that were addressed in distant places through a realpolitik style

negotiation over matters of facts. And so, I have used dingpolitik as a way to point to the

existence of diverse concerns and ways of caring for tuna. For example, I bring to the fore

fishers as figures who do not tend to feature in conservation discourses in a positive light,

who have little authority in decision-making, but who are in the most precarious positions in

relation to the implementation of conservation decisions.

It should be clear through this chapter that the day-to-day lives of fishermen are

characterised by precarity – their expertise is less valued, their catch is smaller and their

future employment uncertain. The future of the tonnara itself is precarious and even though

tuna stocks are looking promising, their future is no more certain. And so in preparation for

the next chapter, I would like to conjure an image of these moments of assembling around

matters of concern, care and conflict as moments of enabling and disenabling. In doing so I

return to Foucault’s notion of productive power from chapter three and ask what are the

productive capacities of a sustainability assemblage and moments of assembling around these

dingpolitik? Do all those groups who assemble have a fair opportunity to represent their

concerns and practices to exert their knowledge and to define the term and terms of

sustainability? Returning to our jumble of participants, we have a variety of formal and

informal ties to tuna and tuna regulation. The task is thus to understand the process of

formalising some groups (their practices, knowledge and forms of life surrounding tuna) and

identifying how other groups become disempowered in decision making processes. Drawing

on Bruun and Kalland (1995, p. 9), the relevant questions thus become:

…which groups possess the authority to formulate the central distinctions and
what are the respective interests of state versus local, elite versus folk culture,
collective versus private, clergy versus commoners and male versus female?

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