Privatization, financialization and ocean grabbing in New Brunswick herring fisheries and salmon aquaculture

- Financialization literature insights are applied to capture fisheries and aquaculture.
- Financialization processes increase vulnerability of local producers and employees.
- Corporate dynamics of financialization deepen understanding of neoliberalism.
- Historically contextualized case studies increase understanding of these processes.

The growing literature on individual transferable quotas (ITQs) and on intensive salmon aquaculture and its negative impacts on the environment and other users of related marine space has been little connected to the developing literature on financialization and to the literature on ocean grabbing within fisheries. This paper seeks to address this gap through a case study of the recent history of herring fisheries and intensive aquaculture in New Brunswick, Canada, exploring how specific neoliberal processes - including privatization and marketization (in herring fleet ITQs and aquaculture lease systems), (re)regulation, financialization and globalization - have interacted to support the reshaping of regional fisheries from mixed small-scale, family-based, petty commodity fisheries towards vertically-integrated, corporate, financialized fisheries characterized by ocean grabbing.