Theorizing participatory governance in contexts of legal pluralism: a conceptual reconnaissance of fishing conflicts and their resolution

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.