Fishing for Development? Tuna Resource Access and Industrial Change in Papua New Guinea ELIZABETH HAVICE AND KRISTIN REED 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. Keywords: Papua New Guinea, tuna, resource access, industrial change, international division of labour, obligated embeddedness INTRODUCTION Papua New Guinea (PNG) – an island state with a vast 3.1 million square kilometres of ocean jurisdiction – is home to one of the largest tuna populations in the world. Since declaring its sovereign right to manage coastal resources for national economic interest in 1978, the PNG government has collected revenues on its tuna almost exclusively through ‘first-generation’ – or ‘cash for access’ – fishing agreements.Through such agreements, foreign fleets pay the govern- ment licensing fees to catch tuna in PNG waters, freeze the fish on board and then transship them for processing at low-cost production sites in South-East Asia and Latin America. As a result of this international division of labour, nearly all of the jobs associated with tuna processing follow the fish outside of PNG. First-generation agreements enable PNG to ‘capture’ roughly 5–6 per cent of the value of tuna caught in its waters (Havice 2010). Based on this equation, in 2010, PNG would have collected roughly US$45 million on unprocessed exports valued at over US$766 million (export value from Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency database). Elizabeth Havice, Department of Geography, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, 324 Saunders Hall, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill, NC 27599 USA. E-mail: havice@email.unc.edu; Kristin Reed, Researcher, Human Rights Center, University of California – Berkeley, 2850Telegraph Ave., Suite 500, Berkeley, CA 94705 USA. E-mail: kreed@berkeley.edu The authors express much gratitude to Liam Campling and Penny Howard for extensive feedback and editorial insight.We also thank the Journal’s editorial team,Takeshi Ito, Scott MacWilliam, Kate O’Neill, Zdravka Tzankova and two anonymous reviewers for extremely helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, Erika Wise for assistance with information visualization and Amanda Henley for carefully making the map.We are grateful to individuals in Papua New Guinea who shared time and resources with us, and the Colorado College Social Science Executive Committee for its generous support,without which this research would not have been possible. Any remaining errors are our own. Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. 12 Nos. 2 and 3, April and July 2012, pp. 413–435. © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd