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Assuming some knowledge is contextual while other knowledge is decontextual reifies these

categories and ignores the labour and alliances necessary to decontextualise knowledge.

Fishery science must go through a process by which its claims become part of global bodies

of knowledge that circulate via textbooks, environmental campaigns or on official archives in

global institutions such as ICCAT and UN. Multiple actors are implicit in this process.

Additionally, scale making is a foundational move of establishing universalisms (Tsing 2005,

p. 87). As Tsing argues, ‘to recognise the globe as the relevant unit for our imaginations

requires work’ (2005, p. 87). The elevation of fishery science to the status of a global body of

knowledge, which is available to respond to a global fishery crisis, requires work. For

example, scales are made through technologies of measuring global catches and their

representations in images and info-graphics (see fig. 5.4). These framings do not adequately

capture how overarching environmental management regimes and their epistemological

underpinnings (or decontextualised knowledge) find traction in localised settings. Nor do

these framings acknowledge the diverse and often conflicting perspectives that exist within

scientific communities or sustainability debates, as we saw in the previous chapter in relation

to tuna stock assessment. In effect, such framings isolate knowledge from practice and global

connection. Sustainability, science and definitions of nature and culture have little meaning

apart from the places and moments where friction occurs and in which they find a localised

traction.

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