Creating political spaces at sea – governmentalisation and governability in Norwegian fisheries

Abstract

How do technologies of power make the world governable? The understanding of how management techniques create governability remains rather poor. In this article, I analyse how spatial regulation in Norwegian fisheries direct human behaviour towards scientific, political, and administrative objectives. Like other fisheries’ regulations, they contribute to governmentalisation and governability, and this article illustrate how this happens. Governance aims towards specific outcomes, but in the attempt to make the world governable, the governing and those who are governed are changed and new social orders may be the result. Thus, governing instruments are not only instruments for the direction of behaviour, but also instruments for social change.