Proximity politics in changing oceans

How will ocean governance actors and institutions handle a future where the abundance and spatial distribution of marine life changes rapidly and variably? The answer, this paper argues, will be influenced by inherited and changing ocean proximity politics, whereby institutions and actors use spatial proximity or adjacency to legitimize particular forms of resource control, conservation and use. Focusing on United Nations and Canadian institutional contexts and recognizing state and non-state actors as agents of policy change, the paper documents and examines why and how spatial proximity has been invoked (i) as a principle for claiming, defining and implementing use rights, privileges and responsibilities for not just nation-states but also for other entities such as coastal communities and small-scale fisheries; (ii) to justify and legitimize rights, privileges and responsibilities for their interest and benefit; and (iii) to inform and challenge global and local discussions about principles such as conservation, sustainability and distributive equity. The future practical use of spatial closeness/distance for guiding policies of access and exclusion under conditions of change will likely be influenced by challenges associated with applying multiple and conflicting governance principles, accommodating diverse interests and interpretations of principle definition and application, and multiple forms of biophysical and social mobilities. The conclusion highlights four areas of further research and policy engagement for the study of ocean proximity politics.


Introduction
As Earth's atmosphere, cryosphere, biosphere and oceans change more rapidly, marine species are expected to be increasingly changing in abundance and geographic distribution. These shifts present a major challenge for prevailing political institutions that have asserted authority to manage interactions between society and marine fisheries (Pinsky et al. 2018). Emerging conflicts in some US fisheries, for example, are shaped in large part by the perceived proximity of coastal US states to marine species whose patterns of abundance and spatial location are subject to debate (Dubik et al. 2019). In a period of declining shrimp abundance over a wide area of the Northwest Atlantic and Labrador Sea, producers and organized interest and Indigenous groups lobbied federal decision-makers by deliberating on the idea that Indigenous and coastal community proximity to shrimp along remote coastlines of Eastern Canada requires special consideration (Foley and Mather 2019). In the face of fundamental change and uncertainty, it is critical to improve our understanding of how the Earth's governance systems and interactions (Biermann 2014;Burch et al. 2019;Kooiman et al. 2008) around the world include principles and policies of closeness/distance to better understand capacities for adaptation. While non-state actors and institutions have been growing in influence in global ocean governance in recent decades (Allison 2001;Kooiman et al. 2005;Foley 2019a;Haas et al. 2021), the state-centric United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) arguably remains the most powerful systematic attempt to govern human interactions with the spaces and biophysical components of Earth's oceans. 1 This international agreement among states fundamentally redefined global social-ecological relations, including sweeping away key elements of the "freedom of the seas" concept in favor of claiming special rights and responsibilities for nation-states over the exploration, use and exploitation of marine resources in new Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) out to 200 nautical miles adjacent to their shores (Campling and Colás 2018). It created a global framework of laws, institutions and practices defining how states might cooperate and manage different activities in and on the ocean, including access to, sharing and distribution of resources (Werle et al. 2019). Indeed, the spatial extension of state rights and responsibilities over more distant proximate seas is rooted in efforts to avoid and resolve competing colonial and inter-state claims over accessing and controlling ocean resources and spaces. A core logic of UNCLOS is to establish that coastal states-states with a sea coastline-have special entitlement to rights and responsibilities over ocean resources most proximate to their shores, mainly because they have a stronger perceived interest in adjacent resources and better capacity to regulate them (Posner and Sykes 2010: 576). For UNCLOS and parties to the agreement, proximity matters a great deal. The implications of this governance idea and the institutional forces it set in motion in the state system are not well understood, however. Enhancing understanding of the role of proximity in ocean governance will add to the body of knowledge needed for more fully understanding the capacity for those institutions to respond to climate and ocean change.
This current lack of understanding in the research community is significant because the way proximity or adjacency 2 is embedded in particular ways of knowing through text, lines and laws can be ambiguous, contested and politicized. Contestation can result from the historical legacy of multiple and overlapping access claims and rights regimes from state and non-state groups and because of the different and changing interests that lay claim to coastal states' relatively recent extension of rights over ocean resources and spaces (Acheson 1975;Durrenberger and Pálsson 1987;St. Martin 2009;McCay 2011;Bavinck and Gupta 2014;Campling and Havice 2014;Gray 2018;Peters 2020;Steinberg et al. 2020). As Elizabeth Havice puts it in relation to capture fisheries, the interaction between a "temporally and spatially dynamic sovereignty" and life in the sea forces different "interests together by fluid ocean materialities and the mobile nature" of those vying for the right and privilege to capture fish for commercial purposes (Havice 2018(Havice : 1280. We therefore need more knowledge to understand the ways in which laws, in broad and pluralistic terms, have been made, contested and remade in oceans that are fluid, material and changing within and outside UNCLOS (Braverman and Johnson 2020). This paper joins others that respond to these needs to form more extended baselines for identifying, understanding and responding to societal conflicts emerging as territorially based resource allocation governance systems prepare for rapid species shifts and distributional changes (Dubik et al. 2019). In order to build and share knowledge about how and why institutional commitments to particular principles emerge and change. This paper identifies how considerations of power, conservation and the equitable distribution of benefitsprinciples popular in analyses of blue growth and blue economy policy agendas that are proliferating around the world (Silver et al. 2015;Barbesgaard 2018;Lehman 2016;Daly et al. 2021;Farmery et al. 2021;Cisneros-Montemayor et al. 2021)-has also interacted powerfully with the principle of proximity. Specifically, this paper aims to examine the ways in which international and Canadian institutional policy contexts explicitly and implicitly reference proximity or adjacency to protect or defend the material and distributive interests and identities of coastal communities and small-scale fisheries.
The following analysis relies on data gathered using a desk-based and web-based rapid appraisal approach, focusing on the indirect and direct use of proximity or adjacency terms in institutional contexts of the United Nations and the Government of Canada. The United Nations was selected because of the significance of UNCLOS for fisheries policies worldwide and related UN institutions of fisheries governance that are responsive to and provide guidance to member state governments. The Government of Canada was selected as an institutional site where the concept of adjacency is specifically referred to relatively widely in policy documents (Foley et al. 2015;Bennett et al. 2018), providing a potential exemplary case where we can expect contentious politics of proximity to intensify in the coming decades. Data collection and analysis focused largely on searching for explicit and implicit references to adjacency and benefits for adjacent entities like communities and small-scale fisheries as a criterion for access and allocation in fisheries within and across formal policy and related documents. The paper then used textual analysis and narrative reconstruction to identify particular policy histories and themes.
The findings indicate that the same kind spatial proximity logic that nation-states employ to justify their claims over nearby oceans has influenced, and been influenced by, narratives about the needs and interests of coastal communities and smallscale fisheries. The analysis also finds that international and Canadian policy histories were shaped by societal forces such as fish harvester associations, a reminder that institutional policy commitments are the result of societal interactions within and beyond the state. Inherited and changing interactions between state and society have powerfully but variably shaped the politics of proximity in the Canadian context, pointing towards the need for better understanding of how societal demands will influence policy change under conditions of rapid change. After describing policy histories and narratives at international and Canadian levels, the paper discusses three factors that have shaped ocean proximity politics in the institutions under examination and will likely continue to do so in Canada and elsewhere into the long-term future: (i) multiple biophysical and societal mobilities that challenge institutional responses; (ii) evidence, and normative arguments, about conservation and equity consequences of access regimes, often linked to studies of small-scale fisheries and nearby coastal communities; and (iii) and distributive, interest-based politics. The paper concludes by summarizing key findings and identifying four areas of future research in ocean proximity politics.

Spatial proximity in global ocean governance
Inter-state conflict and cooperation: power, conservation and equity Viewed from a long-term perspective, the most powerful formal institutions governing the totality of the Earth and its oceans were generated through European colonialism and the modern state system. After enjoying widespread European acceptance for centuries of inter-state wars, the inter-imperialist doctrine of Mare Liberum, "freedom of the seas", that governed state claims to jurisdiction over areas limited to a relatively small distance from coastal shores was challenged through the twentieth century by a new round conflicts. States began to more aggressively assert their claims and defend extractive activities of particular domestic interests. Through social and political conflict and cooperation, new state politics merged with and developed through old relationships and institutions of ocean control (Campling and Colás 2018). These interactions culminated in the United Nations-authorized EEZs, a global zoning framework for governing engagement with the seas. Following negotiations and unilateral declarations, states increasingly accepted the EEZ regime of global ocean governance as customary international law in the 1970s and ultimately in the multi-lateral UNCLOS in 1982 (Copes 1981).
A new ocean governance regime was thus built, consolidating for nation-states massive opportunities for control, conservation and distributing commercial opportunities. More than 95% of global fisheries resources were brought under coastal state jurisdiction, ushering in widespread intensification of existing and new state and societal interventions into the oceans through the geographic extension, redefinition, reorganization and reinstitutionalization of fisheries management (Bavington 2009;Johnsen et al. 2009;Johnsen 2014). A key objective of the negotiators of UNCLOS was to eliminate overfishing by distant-water fleets perceived by coastal states as primary causes of reducing many stocks near their shores and to enable more equitable allocation of fisheries resources for and within nations closest to such resources (Copes 1981). In Eastern Canada, fishers responded to the increasing intensification of fishing by European trawlers in the northwest Atlantic in the post-war period by demanding that the federal government extend exclusive fishing zone from 3 miles to a 12 mile limit (Copes 1981;Hage 1984;De Yturriage 1997;Wright 1997). In addition to multi-lateral organizations and fisheries management ministries, then, societal actors such as fisher associations, corporations and unions mediated relations between society and the sea through the development of norms embedded in UNCLOS. While commercial and capitalistic principles and interests were served well through UNCLOS and related processes (Campling and Colás 2021), coastal communities and small-scale fisheries constituted key elements in addressing the problem of who benefits from oceans and fisheries.

Fisheries for whose benefit?
Demands for ensuring an equitable distribution of benefits was an important, though not uniform, justification for the extension of state claims approximately out to 200 nautical miles from coastal shores. Equity was often embedded in calls for provision of greater benefits for populations typically most disadvantaged in terms of social development, including developing nations, fisheries-dependent populations in coastal communities and consumers in countries dependent on fish imports (Copes 1981). For example, in anticipation of the extension of coastal state jurisdiction to 200 nautical miles in the 1970s, the European Commission developed proposals that included the objective "To protect the income and employment of certain coastal communities" (Berg 1999: 6, 8, 24-25). Believing that a rapid exhaustion of resources would likely result from the implementation of an equal access principle among member states, the draft exemption proposal would have authorized member states to restrict fishing in a 12-mile limit to protect fishermen's access to the proximate zone, giving preferential treatment to regions especially dependent upon fishing including Greenland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and the rest of the UK. The provision was rejected by member states but a resolution concerning the protection of fishermen within the 12-mile zone that required the CFP to take into account the "vital needs of local Communities particularly dependent on fishing" was approved (Berg 1999:27). These policies developed into the Hague Preferences, a Common Fisheries Policy Mechanism that enabled the adjustment of national fishing quotas to provide additional opportunities to fisheries-dependent areas (Harris 1990). Fishermen and coastal communities were also active agents in the construction and reconstruction of such international and national management directives. Like in Europe, fishing association representatives in Canada lobbied state representatives to extend jurisdiction and to introduce regulations that fit their temporal and spatial needs of the day (Hage 1984;Wright 1997).
These interactions between particular societal interests and states help explain why coasts and oceans are key sites in political struggles over the distribution of risks, costs and opportunities and a site for competitive innovation and experimentation in spatial governance (Campling and Colás 2021: p. 2). Just as it formed a core basis for coastal state claims, proximity logically extends to justify serving the interests and needs of coastal communities and small-scale fisheries whose capacity and reach tends to be limited to relatively nearshore activity. Notions of adjacency rights can thus just as easily be used to justify and legitimize claims of coastal interests and identities like communities and smallscale fisheries as it can be used by and for nation-states, including with reference to material access, use and benefits. This has profound potential for influencing fisheries management. As Davis and Wagner explain: "Adjacency was a key reference point in the recognition and distribution of access priority and management authority within the Law of the Sea negotiations and outcomes. In large measure, adjacency goes handin-glove with a claim that the people of coastal nationstates have a history of socio-economic dependence on and continuous use of marine-based resources" (Davis and Wagner 2006: 477).
In addition to finding their way into UNCLOS and related processes, coastal communities and small-scale fisheries have featured prominently in other key United Nations processes for similar reasons of material access, dependence and opportunity. While not using the terms proximity or adjacency, Article 6.18 of the UN FAO Code of Conduct for Responsible Fisheries implies that nation-states support the use needs of small-scale fisheries and communities that are invariably adjacent to marine resources (FAO 1995). More recently, the FAO's Technical Consultation on International Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries identified principles for promoting small-scale fisheries worldwide, with an emphasis on remote, rural communities and vulnerable groups such as Indigenous people and women. Principles of implementation were subsequently instituted in the UN FAO Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (FAO 2015). These guidelines call for attention to, and recognition of, communal and Indigenous rights and prioritizing their access to adjacent fisheries and for their inclusion in decisions that pertain to managing fisheries adjacent to them (FAO 2015). Similar references are embedded in various provisions, such as 5.3 and 5.7, calling on states to secure preferential access for small-scale fisheries, including both protecting existing and creating various new forms (e.g. informal and formal) of tenure rights for small-scale fishers (FAO 2015:5 & 6). Moreover, in addition to highlighting material benefit, the principle of conservation effectiveness is noted in several provisions implying that small-scale fisheries can and should serve as active, responsible and effective stewards of sustainable resource management (FAO 2015:3 & 7). Like states, coastal communities and small-scale fisheries can be perceived as actors with special ways and means to address problems of control, problems of social development for particular communities and productive interests, and problems of conservation.

Proximity policies for eastern Canada's fisheries "We want to build the 200-mile zone from the coast out"
Proximity is a powerful principle of ocean governance. Below, we examine proximity policy emergence and history in Canada. The fisheries management agency responsible for fisheries in Canada's eastern regions has formally incorporated robust references to adjacency explicitly and implicitly since the 1970s and 1980s as the Government of Canada consolidated ways and means to implement UNCLOS provisions of resource control, conservation and distribution.
As the Government of Canada 3 engaged and implemented UNCLOS, it not only shifted policy towards antecedents of neoliberalism through practices of rationalization, efficiency and conservation. Some policies have been responsive to the interests and demands of the inshore smaller-scale fishery. This was particularly true for the eastern fisheries, where a relatively robust set of policies developed that favored the small-scale sector and the coastal communities from where these smaller vessels operated and to where they often landed fish (Barnett et al. 2017). Spatial relations were at the heart of such policy histories. In a speech about northern cod in 1977, Minister LeBlanc, an MP elected to represent a coastal region of New Brunswick, reflected (with gendered language) on why proximity and mobility matters for him and how this is connected to inshore fishermen and coastal communities: "Who gets first crack at these fish? Here I must say… that I have a clear bias for the inshore fisherman. Not because of some romantic regard, not because of his picture on the calendars, but because he cannot travel far after fish, because he depends on fishing for his income, because his community in turn depends on his fishery being protected" (Parsons 1993:123).
In a speech to the Halifax Board of Trade in 1979, he put these conversations into a regional context, highlighting characteristics that would distinguish policy paths on the Atlantic from those for the Pacific and North in important ways: "in Atlantic fisheries generally, our policies support ownership of vessels by individual fishermen, or by the companies they form, rather than by processing companies. We have saved quotas and licenses to give the inshore and midshore men…the chance to move up to better boats and a better fishery. We want to build the 200-mile zone from the coast out" (Gough 2007: 322).

Institutionalization
Over time, and through successive governments, policy makers and policy texts began to more explicitly refer to the concept of adjacency (Parsons 1993:122). The 1984 Atlantic Groundfish Management Plan makes an early formal reference to the principle of adjacency alongside equity as an explicit criterion in resource access and distribution decisions, stating that: "Allocation of fishery resources will be on the basis of equity taking into account adjacency to the resource, the relative dependency of coastal communities and the various fleet sectors upon a given resource, and economic efficiency and fleet mobility" (Blackwood 1996:37).
Through 1980s and early 1990s, the direct and indirect use of the concept spread further. While not explicitly referring to the term adjacency, the Fleet Separation Policy of 1979 calls for the separation of fisheries harvesting ownership from processing ownership in part because of the influence of closeness/distance. It required the discontinued issuance of new fishing licences (meant for vessels < 65 ft in length) to more mobile corporations and processing companies (DFO 2001) that have greater ability to extract benefits from their activities from coastal communities. The Owner-Operator Policy, which appears to have evolved first in Quebec in the 1980's and later in the Maritimes and in Newfoundland's Gulf of St. Lawrence fishing regions, promotes individually operated inshore fleets by requiring that license holders (of vessels < 65ft in length) personally fish their quotas (Gough 2007:326). Spatial proximity principles were also embedded in residency requirements in licensing policies, whereby "residency, area of historical fishing or home port may be used as eligibility requirements when new or replacement licenses are issued" (DFO 1996a, b). It was embedded further in the development of policies for DFO administrative areas or Sectors starting in 1982 "to control access among various fleet sectors and allow for a suitable balance between the resources available and the fishing effort" within the boundaries of a specified sector (DFO 2001).
The area/sector policy had a major influence on the geographic relationship between fishers subject to its rules and the places they were authorized to fish. It eradicated the practice whereby license holders, mainly small vessel fleets, could fish almost anywhere on the Atlantic Coast where quotas were available, and instituted a more restricted but structured system which, with some exceptions such as authorized and historical overlaps, required license holders to fish in a defined fishing area or zone where their home port was located (Parsons 1993:331;DFO 2001). The policy restricted the mobility of the inshore groundfish fleet to DFO administrative areas of their home port and where they held licenses, promoting a formal regulatory link between homeport and adjacent fishing grounds. It also promoted a link between homeport region and adjacent fishing grounds by making licenses for vessels less than 65 feet non-transferable among areas/ Sectors (Parsons 1993:137). The increasing unofficial "violation" of the adjacency principle by mobile fishers was at the heart of these early policy changes. As a policy summary noted, "The increasing mobility and catching capability of certain parts of the fleet created growing opposition to their 'roaming' outside their own area and harvesting quotas before resident operators were ready to fish" (DFO 2001: 10). Residency, area of historical fishing or home port may also be used as eligibility requirements when new or replacement licenses are issued (DFO 1996a(DFO , b, 2018a. The policy "requires that inshore licenses be re-issued only to fishers who reside in or have sufficient attachment to the same DFO administrative area as the current license-holder (residency, home port or area of historical fishing provision)" (DFO 2001: 19).
Proximity and adjacency has become explicit in: 1. Prominent reports that address access criteria, such as Dunne Task Force (Blackwood 1996:78)  The expansive policy directives are particularly impor tant and inf luence other decision-making paths such as integrated fisheries management plans (IFMPs). The New Access Framework, for example, includes adjacency as one of the four criteria to "guide all decisions on new or additional access to Atlantic commercial fisheries which have undergone substantial increases in resource abundance or landed value" (DFO 2002). The framework defines adjacency for decisionmakers in the following way: "Priority of access should be granted to those who are closest to the fishery resource in question. The adjacency criterion is based on the explicit premise that those coastal fishing communities and fishers in closest proximity to a given fishery should gain the greatest benefit from it, and on the implicit assumption that access based on adjacency will promote values of local stewardship and local economic development" (DFO 2002).
While the definition is useful, interpretive disputes emerged as a persistent source of contention. In reviewing allocation processes for the Northern shrimp, for example, various producer interests tended to "interpret the adjacency principle in ways that most optimizes their own positions" (Barrow et al. 2001:40-41). Adjacency and other criteria for access and allocation were evaluated as being vague and illdefined, with considerable confusion as to the meaning of adjacency for some observers and interest groups (Jackman et al. 2002;Keenan and Carruthers 2015;Foley et al. 2017). Efforts to resolve these issues fully have met with limited success, partly because of challenges in developing universally acceptable definitions and solutions (Jackman et al. 2002:15-16, 73). Even the idea of according less weight to the adjacency principle in situations where interests relied on more distant resources (e.g. in the case of offshore fisheries) has met challengers (Government of Newfoundland and Labrador 2002). While this definition points towards a relatively robust textual commitment to proximity, the ability of groups to benefit from living and changing materialities is affected by a range of societal factors beyond spatial proximity (Parlee et al. 2021 The living, moving materiality of distributional (in)equity The ability of coastal states to effectively and ethically manage and govern sovereign rights and responsibilities created and maintained through UNCLOS has raised critical questions of law, governance and sustainability in recent decades (Alcook 2002;Tan-Mullins 2007;Johnsen et al. 2009;Lam and Pauly 2010;Chircop 2011;Menon et al. 2016). Imminent and ongoing rapid climate and oceanic change will further intensify questions and challenges for governance institutions. In this context, proximity will likely be particularly affected, among other forces, by (i) mobilities of biophysical and societal processes, (ii) narratives of conservation advantage and problem solving for coastal communities and other related interests such as small-scale fisheries and (iii) distributive politics.

Mobilities
Mobilities of marine life, fishing capital and fleets, and workers all make proximity politics more complicated under conditions of change. As Steinberg observes, to understand nation-state territories, "one must go beyond tracing the spatially fixed activities…or the discursive strategies though which the territory is made to appear natural. One must also trace the acts of movement that occur within, across and outside the territory's boundaries and the designation of spaces of movement as beyond territorial control" (Steinberg 2009: 467). Mobilities structure, enliven, challenge and change the relationship between space and sovereignty (Havice 2018). In the Canadian context, for example, one major access criteria report contrasted managing lobster fishing (relatively close to shore) to tuna fishing (generally pursued well offshore) in part because of the different mobilities of each species, implying that as distances increase the adjacency principle ought to have less significance in allocation decisions (Jackman et al. 2002:14). The report recommended that the use of the adjacency principle in resource access and distribution was more logical and appropriate for sedentary species such as lobster and crab and less logical or appropriate in more migratory species (Jackman et al. 2002:81).
This creates two further challenges related to socialspatial relations. The first is related to more complex social situations in which people migrate or live and work in relatively mobile situations (which, for example, make residency requirements a problem). People move temporarily and for more or less longer periods, living in areas adjacent to fishing areas for temporary periods, sometimes limited to the fishing season. Settlement and residency patterns are not static. Seasonal migration is a common livelihood strategy in small-scale fisheries (FAO 2015:x) and the social and demographic characteristics of coastal fishing communities are changing, including with more dispersed occupational communities embedded in a more diverse economy (Symes and Phillipson 2009:2). Despite residency and home port requirements in Canada, the question of who is adjacent is not always straightforward in social-ecological contexts in which people are on the move. The second challenge is related to the mobility of capital, which has defined class, household and gender relations for centuries of commercial fishing in places like Newfoundland (Foley 2019a, b). Dramatic increases of strategies by capital investors to redirect benefits from owner-operator and coastal communities to corporate enterprises, aided in large part by the use of contract law to create controlling agreements between owner-operators and investors to circumvent owner-operator policy, have accelerated in recent decades (Edwards and Pinkerton 2019; Barnett et al. 2017). Increasing mobility of capital is driven in part by the problem of the spatial fix, whereby forces push to extend commercial rights to new ocean resources and spaces as control, conservation and sharing get strained in existing relations (Campling and Colás, 2021).

Conservation and co-management
Adjacency creates certain governance advantages too. Research by marine social scientists suggests that people who live permanently near resources often have a long-term interest in using those resources sustainably (See, for example: McCay and Acheson 1987;Berkes 1989;Ostrom 1990;Pinkerton 1999). This research suggests that local communities are capable of designing institutions that can limit access to adjacent fish resources equitably and effectively (Pinkerton 1999). For similar reasons, two of the eight principles for how common pool resources can be equitably and sustainably governed in a community include defining clear group boundaries and matching rules governing use to local needs and conditions (Ostrom, 1990).
Some researchers have long argued that proximity justifies devolution and power sharing to certain coastal interests like small-scale fisheries. Almost 40 years ago, Panayotou argued that "The revival and rejuvenation of traditional community rights over coastal resources offer, perhaps, the best possible management option for scattered, remote and fluid, small-scale fisheries" (Panayotou 1982). More recently, Daniel Pauly argues for the advantages of adjacency while promoting new visions for future fisheries: "because small-scale fishers invariably live close to their fishing grounds, and depend on the resource therein and on no others, they can be (re-)connected, if need be, with the idea of caring for the resources; which the hired hands on board of industrial vessels cannot afford to do. Combined with the obvious advantage of adjacency (short sailing time, and hence limited fuel consumption, if fuel is used), this is a major reason why small-scale fisheries have the potential of becoming the fisheries of the future" (Pauly 2011:17). Echoing Christy's analysis of Territorial Use Right Fisheries (Christy 1982), Pinkerton similarly argues that: "Management problems are best solved when rights accrue to the parties best suited to be accountable to sustainable management practices and to resolve inter-sectoral conflicts. These usually turn out to be those parties with long-term relationships to, and dependence on, local fishing territories…" (Pinkerton 1999:340). For similar reasons, adjacency is included as an ethical attribute for evaluating and comparing the status and sustainability of fisheries (Pitcher and Preikshot 2001). The idea that government should share more responsibility with place-based communities and regions most affected by resource policies or decisions is thus grounded in evidence suggesting that proximity enhances legitimacy and effectiveness (Pinkerton 2019). While proximity justifies new power sharing arrangements such as comanagement, the application of principles of proximity, and their precise relations to equity and conservation, is also subject to challenges of distributive and interest-based politics.

Distributive politics
Fisheries governance is politicized through UNCLOS and state management institutions in wide-ranging and diverse ways. The institutional efforts of coastal states to create, manage and govern sovereign rights and responsibilities through UNCLOS have become "entangled in a web of different instruments, stakeholder groups, policies and sciences that made panoptic control and management impossible" with "rationality, truth and decision making in the system [becoming] objects for negotiation between scientists, users, politicians and bureaucrats, and consequently the rational foundation of management became challenged" (Johnsen et al. 2009: pp. 14-15). Establishing claims and rights of engagement, use and management by proximity lays bare ways in which the relationship between land and sea is not reducible to the static and binary inscriptions and divisions that characterize formal legal arrangements such as UNC-LOS (Boucquey et al. 2016;Steinberg et al. 2020). Critical political economy and political ecology analyses have identified how multiple dimensions of proximity, distance and mobility interact with old and new discursive and material transformations of oceans as a frontier of state and capital resource extraction, financialization and grabbing (Bennett et al. 2015;Knott and Neis 2017;Barbesgaard 2018;Foley and Mather 2019;Havice and Zalik 2018). While discourses, narratives and practices of neoliberalism tend to receive scrutiny in terms of consequences for power relations, conservation and equity Pinkerton and Davis 2015;Boucquey 2017), the consequences of the politics of proximity in changing oceans for power, conservation and equity are subject to relatively little research and policy attention.
Over longer periods of time, proximity politics will become more complex as climate change alters the geographic patterns and distributions of fish habitats and populations. Policy makers at international and national levels are unprepared for the shifting geographic distributions in marine animals in the coming decades. As Pinsky and colleagues observe, changes in geographic distributions of fish will create potential for conflict between and within countries, in part because "existing fisheries management and governance are largely predicated on population geographies that remain broadly static through time" (Pinsky et al. 2018(Pinsky et al. :1189. Existing international legal and policy frameworks for fisheries, including UNCLOS, do not account for changing or fluctuating distributions of marine species (Pinsky et al. 2018(Pinsky et al. :1190. Management authorities will therefore need to acquire reliable projections of species shifts, take account of uncertainties and plan for cooperative management under such changing conditions and scenarios of shared stocks (Gaines et al. 2018).
New politics of proximity will also likely be defined by contestation resulting from multi-criteria decision-making. The challenge of defining and applying multiple criteria for granting access rights and privileges emerged as a longstanding issue in Eastern Canada (Jackman et al. 2002). These challenges were compounded by the diverse interests and actors vying to define multiple access criteria. We can expect regionally specific state/societal actors and interactions to influence how principles of conservation and equity interact with proximity politics. Such actors and interactions will influence responses to change and uncertainty.

Conclusion
Climate and ocean change are putting increased pressure on governance actors and institutions to respond and adapt to change (Pinsky et al. 2018;Young et al. 2018). Centering analysis on proximity politics across and within colonial and nation-states, this paper contributes to a reinvigorated social science research agenda for fisheries (Bavinck et al. 2018;Jentoft 2020) and to broader literatures that have identified proximity as a key component of multidimensional spatialized narratives of distributional environmental injustice and justice (Walker 2009). This paper's findings support critical assessments that suggest it is necessary to understanding about the significance of how wider social and spatial contexts, including individuals, households, classes and organizations, are also implicated in the social patterns of environmental justice (Walker 2009). Understanding policy histories is one way to help enhance understanding of how past legacies constrain or enable opportunities for old and new actors to exert progressive influence over global ocean governance . By including narrative policy histories in international and national contexts, this paper demonstrates how state governance is not simply imposed on passive places, materials and people. Instead, they interact with, challenge and are rearticulated by social and biophysical forces. These interactions create potential for new "blue legalities" that build on old and new ways of knowing, understanding and relating to the world (Braverman and Johnson 2020).
More diverse sources and forms of knowledge and narratives are needed, however, to more comprehensively understand proximity politics and its relationship to other forces of change and continuity. For example, how social structures, relationships and struggles within and outside the state influence paths of development and change as it relates to fisheries requires further understanding (Bavinck et al. 2018;Parlee et al. 2021). For the study of proximity politics specifically, more research should: 1. Incorporate multiple sectors and alternative uses as competing demands for using ocean space through activities such as shipping, trade, slavery, bondage, aquaculture, wind farms and seafronts intensifies (Campling and Colás 2021); 2. Build better comparative, interdisciplinary and integrated understanding of proximity politics across different institutional, societal and biophysical contexts.
Such comparative and integrated work should incorporate examining more diverse strategies and policies of proximity politics. It should also examine how proximity politics are impacted by other forces of change such as sea-level rise (Yusuf et al. 2014), oxygenation, infrastructure development, migration, class, labour, colonialism, gender, race and intersectionality. This research will benefit from richer engagements with and across natural sciences, social sciences (Jentoft 2020), blue humanities (e.g. DeLoughrey 2019; Alaimo 2019) and other inter and trans-disciplines and fields of research and policy. 3. Document past, existing and potential policy narratives and objectives to inform future governance and narrative deliberation. Narratives help define our thinking and action and prominent observers have called for "a new narrative for the ocean" (Lubchenco and Gaines 2019). Just as narratives of sharing and who benefits defines UNCLOS and Canadian policy histories, future struggles will likely center on powerful and competing narratives about proximity and its implications for control, conservation and material distribution of societal benefits. 4. Use any enhanced understanding of policy narratives to help inform collaborative research and action/policy networks. Such networks could include multiple groups, including Indigenous and local people, to build and/or resist particular policies. Narratives are not simply a source of policy development but can also act "as tools to resist certain policies or activities", including to "increase access or re-territorialize the ocean in ways that would favor some communities or certain groups" (Bennett 2019).
Narrative tools and rhetorical devices have always shaped modern, colonial, state and non-state ocean discourses, knowledge and governance about oceans. Narrative tools are also useful for evaluating adaptation options and building capacity for imagining and adapting to actual changes in the short, medium and long term (Nash et al. 2020;Spijkers et al. 2021). As the United Nations seeks to achieve major scientific and developmental goals (UN 2020;FAO 2020;Singh et al. 2021), documenting and sharing policy histories and narratives could help influence global and local ocean governance. This paper provides opportunities for moving in this direction.