Browsing by Author "Schultz, Oliver John"

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    Belonging to the West Coast : an ethnography of St Helena Bay in the context of marine resource scarcity
    (2010) Schultz, Oliver John; Green, Lesley
    This dissertation uses ethnography as a means to examine how multiple-scale patterns of interaction between social and ecological systems as they manifest locally in St Helena Bay. The growing integration of the West Coast has brought rapid change in the form of industrial production, urban development and in-migration. The pressure placed on local resources by these processes has been exacerbated by the rationalisation of the local fisheries - there are fewer jobs in the formal industry and small-scale fishing rights have become circumscribed. In the neighbourhood of Laingville, historically-contingent racial categories have become reinvigorated in a context resource scarcity.
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    Power and democracy: the politics of representation and participation in small-scale fisheries governance on the Cape Peninsula
    (2015) Schultz, Oliver John; Sowman, Merle; Menon, Ajit
    The tension between power and democracy is crucial for understanding the nature and Outcomes of marine and coastal fisheries governance processes. However, this thesis Argues that prominent contemporary approaches to fisheries theory tend to promote a neoliberal vision of 'politics without politics', in which emphasis is placed on inclusive, de-centred and collaborative interaction between multiple and divergent state and non-state actors. By doing so, this perspective is likely to predispose the observer to underestimate the primacy of power as a factor determining the engagement between multiple actors in fisheries governance processes. This thesis seeks to address this apparent oversight by exploring some of the crucial power dynamics that are understated or overlooked by contemporary approaches to fisheries governance theory. It presents an ethnographic study of power and micro-politics in public participation and community based representation among small-scale fishing communities on South Africa's Cape Peninsula. The study is filtered through the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu and other critical scholars, so as to reveal the material and symbolic forms of power and strategic practices that manifested through processes of representation and participation. This thesis demonstrates that community-based representation and public participation can serve as mechanisms for dominant actors to exercise and increase their power, while undermining rather than supporting the democratic interests and efforts of small-scale fishers. Drawing on this research on the Cape Peninsula, and on the theorising of Bourdieu and other critical scholars, this thesis concludes by suggesting how power can be brought into the analysis and theorisation of fisheries governance. In particular, this thesis proposes a real politik perspective as a means to understand how structural and micro-political power dynamics constrain the possibilities for democratic small-scale fisher representation and participation in fisheries governance processes.