Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and the arbiters (see also Pospisil 1971; Bavinck and Woodman 2009). The latter are
the 'governors' of the societal system at hand - those who interact to 'solve societal
problems and create societal opportunities'.
Legal pluralism is a condition that applies when various legal systems are appli-
cable to an identical situation (Vanderlinden 1972), such as a disagreement regarding
fishing practice. Power differentials play an important role in deciding the outcome
of such differences. For example, in situations where business elites are supported by
the state, their collaboration may favor a set of rules that maintains the status quo.
Referring again to Weber, we define power in the limited sense of “the possibility of
imposing one's will upon the behavior of other persons'' (1954: 323). Domination is
the condition by which one legal system overrules another or assumes a privileged sta-
tus in practice.
6
We will argue below that participatory governance is concerned with
reversing patterns of domination, and increasing the power of primary stakeholders -
the fishers - over the governance process.
Figure 9.1 refers to three ideal-typical legal systems, coinciding with local, national
and international scale levels. Real life situations of course vary from this simplistic
schema. We have also numbered the legal systems in the sequence in which they have
generally arisen, starting from local and moving to national and international. The
assumption is that local law frequently remains more important than national and
international law (although here too there may be differences).
We made reference above to power and domination shaping the way in which
particular legal systems are prioritised and often imposed on others. Understanding
why particular legal systems are privileged, however, requires examining how priorities
with regard to resource allocation are determined. Political ecology emphasises that the
allocation of fisheries resources is determined in the realm of politics and that actors
with more political and economic power are able to shape policy choices. We shall
see below that in the case of both South Africa and South Asia, the movement toward
a more commercially-driven fisheries was because these fisheries, often supported by
the state, were able to impose their writ on small-scale fishers. The other dimension of
political ecology of importance is its focus on how the allocation of resources affects
different people unequally; in our cases the small-scale fishers are adversely affected
by more commercialised fisheries.
What political ecology does is suggest that inequalities within society might ham-
per initiatives that aim at improving the sustainability (ecological, socio-cultural and
economic) of the SG. Particular fishers might not want to change the GS because the
present system supports their interests. However, political ecology also recognises that
people contest systems that undermine their livelihoods and customary rights, and
that spaces may be created to do so. The challenge is therefore to find such spaces or
opportunities (Isaacs 2003; Ribot 2004).
6
Weber (1954:328) defines domination as: the situation inwhich: the manifestedwill (
command
)
of the
ruler
or rulers is meant to influence the conduct of one or more others (
the ruled
) and
actually does influence it in such a way that their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs
as if the ruled had made the content of the command the maxim of their conduct for its very
own sake. Looked upon from the other end, this situation will be called
obedience
'' (italics in
the original).
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