This paper examines how large-scale fishmeal processing impacts women’s work in The Gambia. Fishmeal factories use bonga (Ethmalosa fimbriata), a staple fish in The Gambia, to produce fishmeal for the global aquaculture industry. The Gambian government yearns for FDI in fishmeal factories to industrialise the fisheries sector, increase fisheries contribution to GDP and ultimately achieve sustainable development through South-South Cooperation with Chinese and Mauritanian capital. However, coastal communities, especially women who live and work within the vicinity of three relatively new Chinese-Mauritanian factories, have been protesting the operations of the factories since 2017. Communities complain about livelihood dispossessions such as the displacement and disruption of women’s work, food insecurity, as well as environmental and health concerns engendered by the factories. Using ethnographic methods and ecofeminist as well as feminist political ecology approaches, I argue that the operations of the fishmeal factories, which are underpinned by capitalist, patriarchal logic, disrupt women’s work as gardeners and fish vendors. Consequently, instead of promoting sustainable development, fishmeal processing undermines it.

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The media plays a central role in the dissemination of information about globally significant, transboundary issues like world water policy and infrastructure projects. This discussion makes its point of departure on the topic of large-scale seawater desalination (producing potable ocean water) in the American borderlands and Southwest region, an area that has recently been plagued by droughts, as well as being the subject of much reporting on the feasibility of expanding water infrastructure across the United States and Mexico. In particular, The New York Times has produced a series of stories on water scarcity in the state of Arizona and the “pipe dreams” of building a desalination plant in Mexico that would produce water to be pumped through a national monument, and into major Arizonan metropolitan areas like Phoenix and Tucson. This reportage has been useful in bringing water concerns amidst climate change to a broader audience, simultaneously challenging the well-known American “growth machine” paradigm. However, when considering the recent scholarship from social scientists and water policy scholars, the media may be missing the point. In this transboundary region, when we consider existing evidence as well as the reports that have emerged in Arizona and Mexico, it becomes clear that water from desalination is a luxury good, and the industry continues to have a dubious political and economic track record when dealing with water providers, public and private. Therefore, more discussions of desalination in world water policy circles need to be asking who is served by desalination, as it increasingly represents a model of the overproduction of water in places that do not need it, therefore entrenching social inequality.

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Sustainable development is often represented as contributing to desirable outcomes across economic, environmental, and social goals, yet policies and interventions attempting to deliver sustainable development often disagree on the order in which these categories of goals should be addressed. In this Essay, we identify and review 5 approaches (called logic models) for sustainable development in ocean systems based on existing policies and interventions and consider the evidence for their contributions to equity—the ultimate goal of sustainable development according to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Two of the 5 logic models prioritize economic growth and lead to social and environmental benefits, 2 prioritize environmental health as a prerequisite for sustainable economic and social benefits, and the final logic model is community driven and prioritizes social dimensions. Looking towards the 2030 maturation of the SDGs, we will need to understand what models are best suited to deliver on equity gains and prevent future inequities in development and how best to operationalize them.

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