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The productive power of sustainability also involves defining and locating the key

problems and solutions. A central argument of this thesis is that sustainability discourses

focus on the fishery as the problem and solution, positioning fisheries as isolated technical

systems. This artificially divorces a product (the Coles eco tin or Atlantic bluefin) from its

socio-cultural context and from the many other ecosystems through which it moves. The

fishery is a complex hybrid socio-material entity (Mansfield 2003, p. 6) and so is the tonnara.

As I have demonstrated, like most fisheries it has a social context that extends beyond the

capture method and the legislative boundaries. Nonetheless these days the tonnara is situated

as a fishery in relation to legislation and environmental campaigning. For the purpose of

allocating quota it is a type of gear to catch a species in a specific location. Treating the

fishery as the unit of analysis is a clear example of an environmentally focused sustainability

discourse (as discussed in chapter three), as opposed to an integrated sustainability discourse

(as discussed in chapter two). The EU proposal might draw on a four-pillar discourse by

mobilising tradition and describing the socio-economic and cultural context, but these aspects

are treated as a background to support the sustainability of the trap as data generating system

and point of bluefin capture. The Coles eco tin shares these conditions of sustainability, as I

demonstrated in chapter one, and there are ecological and socio-cultural limitations and

consequences of focusing on the fishery. Again this is an example of the productive capacity

of sustainability: the power to define the term sustainability and its rules of operation.

Throughout this thesis I have argued that the focus on the fishery and mainly

ecological dimensions is the result of nature and culture being treated as distinct areas of

intervention. That is, our institutionalisation of nature and culture as separate entities to be

managed has created a situation where a significant component of the tonnara can be

disregarded or, in the case of eco certification, major parts of a tinned tuna supply chain

ignored. By drawing on Val Plumwood’s (2008a) concept of shadow places I argued for the

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