Environmental Engineering Reference
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Theorizing participatory governance
in contexts of legal pluralism - a
conceptual reconnaissance of
fishing conflicts and their resolution
Maarten Bavinck 1 ,Merle Sowman 2 &Ajit Menon 3
Abstract Many coastal fisheries, including those of South Asia and South Africa,
are characterised by high levels of social conflict, environmental deterioration and
fragmented governance. The REINCORPFISH research project analyses the conflicts
occurring in the fisheries of these two regions and promotes a governance process that
recognises the existence of (a) multiple actors, and (b) legal pluralism. More impor-
tantly, it strives to further a governance style that does justice to fisher interests and
builds from the bottom up. The present chapter provides a conceptual framework for
analyzing such processes within the context of interactive governance theory (Kooiman
2003; Kooiman et al. 2005). The starting point is the perspective of collective action
that explains why and how individuals and groups, who rely heavily on specific natural
resources, develop autonomous institutions for their management. Legal pluralism and
political ecology theories provide tools for analyzing the roles and conflicting interests
of other institutional actors, such as state agencies, in resource management, and the -
positive and negative - interactions between various legal systems. The resulting frame-
work is applied to investigate and compare the nature of fishery conflicts across the
two regions and identify, from a theoretical perspective, the bottlenecks and chances
for effective, participatory governance.
Keywords Conflict, governance, legal pluralism, South Asia, South Africa, fisheries.
9.1 INTRODUCTION
This chapter, which deals with capture fisheries in the South, has two starting points:
the notion (1) that fisheries conflicts in the current age are substantially different than
in the past, and (2) that such conflicts are as much about fisheries as they are about
the governance frameworks that act upon them. It stresses the perspectives of fishery
underdogs - the populations of small-scale fishers who inhabit the coastal zones of Asia,
Africa, Latin America and some parts of the North. Small-scale fisheries are contrasted
with large-scale, industrialised fisheries. Points of departure are the increasing value of
 
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