Second panel on valuation studies
This summer, the Little Tools team will co-organize a full-day open panel on valuation studies in Barcelona. The panel is part of the 4S/EASST conference, which is the world's largest STS conference, co-organized by the American and European organizations of STS researchers.
The panel's main topic is valuation from the margins. It builds upon last year's panel on valuation practices, organized at the 4S conference in Denver in November, 2015.
Kristin Asdal has been part of the panel's planning team together with Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Francis Lee and Freyja Knapp.
The little tools of valuation
The Little Tools team will present one paper during the panel: "The little tools of large scale visions". The paper has the following abstract:
Documents are key sites in which valuations are done. One highly interesting and most important example of this, is the major expansion of documents articulating large-scale policy visions for a European future in which green growth, innovation and the new bioeconomy are made central concepts. Indeed, documents both in the EU and beyond are envisioning blue growth, in which the marine sector – fisheries, aquaculture and related industries – is recast as a driver of this new bioeconomy.
In this paper, we seek to explore how these policy documents appreciate nature and the environment while at the same time envisioning economic growth, both in sheer output volume (amount of fish produced) and in terms of value production in the conventional sense (financial revenue). How do these documents, what we call the little tools of government, work upon the issue of aquaculture to redefine what was previously understood as limits to growth and conflicts of interest into technical problems that may be solved by means of innovation and new technologies?
In pursuing this question, we will investigate empirical materials from the EU and Norway, a small country at the margins of Europe aiming to become the world’s leading producer of farmed fish. How do the little tools of Norwegian aquaculture policy produce this desired future?