Capture fisheries are constituted through historically specific environmental conditions and social and economic relations of production. Fisheries, whether saltwater or freshwater, are an important source of animal protein, livelihoods and exchange value in international trade, and are presently undergoing rapid socio‐ecological change. To explore the political economy and ecology of capture fisheries around the world, this paper synthesizes the insights of 11 empirical studies and places fisheries in the broader context of the capitalist relations of production through which they operate. The competitive market dynamics of fisheries production and consumption are examined, as well as the forms of social‐property relations, social differentiation, labour exploitation and resistance that occur within them. This paper highlights some of the ways in which the unique combination of characteristics associated with fish and fisheries complement and complicate familiar questions in agrarian political economy. It concludes by identifying future research directions.

The international development community is off-track from meeting targets for alleviating global malnutrition. Meanwhile, there is growing consensus across scientific disciplines that fish plays a crucial role in food and nutrition security. However, this ‘fish as food’ perspective has yet to translate into policy and development funding priorities. We argue that the traditional framing of fish as a natural resource emphasizes economic development and biodiversity conservation objectives, whereas situating fish within a food systems perspective can lead to innovative policies and investments that promote nutrition-sensitive and socially equitable capture fisheries and aquaculture. This paper highlights four pillars of research needs and policy directions toward this end. Ultimately, recognizing and working to enhance the role of fish in alleviating hunger and malnutrition can provide an additional long-term development incentive, beyond revenue generation and biodiversity conservation, for governments, international development organizations, and society more broadly to invest in the sustainability of capture fisheries and aquaculture.

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In value chain scholarship, 'chain governance' is the relationships of power among firms in a production network. For economic geographers working on the environment, 'governance' refers primarily to state and non-state based institutional and regulatory arrangements shaping humanenvironment interactions. Yet the theoretical and empirical links between these two concepts of governance are opaque. Drawing on a longitudinal case study of the canned tuna value chain and an historical materialist method, we demonstrate how inter-firm strategies over the appropriation of value and distribution of costs and risks work through the environment. We document moments of change in the value chain that enliven a dynamic understanding of how a lead firm becomes and reproduces its power, and strategies that subordinate firms deploy to try to counter the power of lead firms. We posit that these moves broaden value chain scholarship's focus from governance typologies towards the 'gravitational tendencies' of capitalist competition and that such tendencies are inextricable from the environmental conditions of production through which they are made possible. This approach enables us to look at value chains and the environmental conditions of production as mutually constitutive, helping to explain vexing modern 'environmental' problems as a core element of the general tendencies, mechanisms and drivers of power in chains.

Papua New Guinea (PNG) is an island state with sovereign rights over valuable tuna resources. Historically, PNG captured value from tuna only by charging licensing fees to foreign fishing fleets, which relegated PNG as a source of raw material for the global tuna industry. To capture more value from tuna – including much‐needed jobs and infrastructure – the PNG government now offers firms that invest in domestic tuna processing plants strategic, long‐term fishing licences. This strategy of ‘obligating embeddedness’ enables PNG to reorder the international division of labour in the canned tuna sector, but socio‐economic outcomes are shaped by competition within the global tuna industry, the core business strategies of foreign firms and domestic conditions in PNG. Ultimately, a state's right to control the terms of access to tuna is not synonymous with its ability to shape the local‐level consequences that emerge as firms comply. These findings reveal the peculiar nature of state sovereignty over pelagic marine resources and the complications of exploiting them to achieve domestic economic and social objectives.