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A historical perspective on MPA identification and governance in South Africa reflects the continued influence of a top-down and natural science-based paradigm, that has hardly changed over the past half century, despite the wealth of literature, and a growing consensus, that advocates the need to adopt a more integrated and human-centered approach. Based on extensive research in two coastal fishing communities, the paper highlights impacts and conflicts arising from this conventional approach to MPA identification, planning and management. It argues that failure to understand the particular fishery system in all its complexity, in particular the human dimensions, and involve resource users in planning and decision-making processes, undermines efforts to achieve conservation and fisheries management objectives. The customary rights of local resource users, and their food and livelihood needs in relation to marine resources, need to be acknowledged, prioritized and integrated into planning and decision-making processes. Convincing ecologists, fisheries scientists and managers, that MPA success depends on addressing the root causes of resource decline and incorporating social factors into MPA identification, planning and management, remains a huge challenge in South Africa.

Historians of apartheid ‘political corruption’ have employed universal definitions which generate normative judgements rather than historical understanding of changing practices and derive measures of corruption from the macro topography of state and society not their actual micro practices. An alternative historical approach recognises political corruption as contingent and requiring situated micro readings to reveal the shifting moral economy of power. This essay offers just such a reading from the inshore fisheries and the early apartheid period (pre-1966) when the extant scholarly literature agrees that ‘political corruption’ was absent. It traces the endeavours of Dawid Johannes Louw ‘Dawie’ Walters to secure a lobster export licence for himself over the decade 1955–1964 and argues that his quixotic quest engineered a key shift in state policy to break the inherited Anglo-Jewish monopoly in the fisheries. Walters’ lack of education, naiveté and alcoholism ensured that others picked the fruits of his labours, but here too the prevailing moral economy of volkskapitalisme determined who those beneficiaries were. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) is an attempt to marry redistributive and neo-Iiberal economic policies. The South African state, however, has differing degrees of power to force redistribution on different sectors of the economy. Fisheries is one of the sectors where state allocation of licenses, exploitation rights and quotas makes the prospects for BEE promising. In this article, we examine redistributive processes in the hake trawl industry. We conclude that BEE, despite its redistributive intentions, has been doubly conducive to the interests of large-scale South African capital. To begin with, it has by and large confirmed the historical share of fishing rights to incumbent, largely white-controlled, operators. Second, it has created a layer of ‘black captains of industry’ to whom incumbents are increasingly outsourcing primary production in a volatile, high-risk and currently loss-leading sector. While fishing operations are being outsourced under the banner of redistribution, the fish trade remains under the effective control of white capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The integration of the South African fisheries into the global economy has operated as a powerful constraint on post-apartheid fisheries reform. The shedding of South Africa''s international pariah status and currency depreciation enhanced access to and competitiveness on global markets, sparking a demersal-led export boom, which has favoured incumbent producers. Increased exports have also allowed the post-apartheid state and nascent black capital to maximise their returns from the fisheries through cost recovery and share purchases. The protection and promotion of the fisheries’ “international competitiveness”, inter alia sought through “sustainable fishery” certification of the hake industry with the Maritime Stewardship Council (MSC), has in turn provided a cover-all for the refusal of populist redistribution demands and special treatment for black small capital. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The paper argues that the reduction of history to “apartheid” has hamstrung efforts to reform the South African fisheries since 1994, by privileging race over class and state. The salience of the latter in the maintenance and reproduction of endemic inequality is demonstrated by a comparison of the current reform process with that in the 1940s. This reveals a series of striking similarities and shows how the initial redistribution agenda in both instances was subverted in favour of a consolidation of monopoly capital and state control over the marine commons. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Offers a critique of structuralist theories of the salience of `external determinants' in South Africa's post-1945 industrialization by way of a case study of the Saint Helena Bay fisheries. Capital and labor in the Saint Helena Bay fisheries; Emergence of small-scale fishing from 1936 to 1946; Decline of small-scale fishing from 1946 to 1956.