State and Environment: The Comparative Study of Environmental Governance

10 Enforcement and Compliance in African Fisheries: The Dynamic Interaction between Ruler and Ruled

10 Enforcement and Compliance in African Fisheries: The Dynamic Interaction between Ruler and Ruled Martin Sjöstedt Millions of African small-scale fishers and their families depend on fish and fishing for income and nutrition, and fish exports and licensing agreements with foreign fleets constitute an important source of foreign exchange and revenue for the cash-strapped African states. Yet many fisheries suffer from overexploitation and ecological stress, endangering the livelihoods of some of the poorest segments of society, putting pressure on public finances, and also severely threatening the overall health of the oceans (FAO 2006; Devine, Baker, and Haedrich 2006; World Bank 2004; Myers and Worm 2003). Overexploitation certainly comes as no surprise to scholars of institutional theory and natural resource management (see Hardin 1968; Demsetz 1967). Yet, more than dismal predictions, institutional theory also provides remedies, and various forms of institutional arrangements such as marine protected areas and quota systems have been put forward as potential silver bullets in managing marine resources and fisheries (Scott 1988; Hilborn, Parrish, and Litle 2005; Andersen 1995). But the academic debate over which of these arrangements that might work better than the others—i.e., largely a debate concerning institutional design—by and large overlooks the fundamental issue of enforcement in the form of monitoring, control, and surveillance (MCS) and in particular lacks an understanding of the severe theoretical and practical challenges involved in establishing such enforcement. The theoretical starting point in this chapter is that while fisheries management, as well as wildlife management in general, highlight two fundamental relationships in society—a horizontal relationship between citizens in a society and a vertical relationship between the government and its citizens (Gibson 1999; Sjöstedt 2012)—most theoretical and empirical effort has been focused on the horizontal one. As such, there has been a lot of research and policy effort deployed into studying and trying 266 Martin Sjöstedt to solve classical collective action dilemmas among citizens. The vast institutions -as-remedy literature holds that institutions enable, guide, and motivate individual behavior—and by changing expectations of other people’s behavior, high-quality institutions can produce and sustain longterm sustainable use of natural resources (Greif 2006). The Significance of the Government-Citizen Relationship The role of the government in this situation is basically to provide the institutions and to act as a third-party enforcer, making sure that the horizontal agreement between citizens is fulfilled. Yet, as correct and important as such insights may be, far less effort has been devoted to studying the theoretical problems involved in establishing such institutions in the first place, and especially the dynamic vertical relationship between ruler and ruled that enforcement of the institutionalized rules entails. In short, what makes the vertical relationship between the government and its citizens qualitatively different—and theoretically more difficult compared to the horizontal relationship between citizens—is the absence of third-party enforcement. More specifically, in this relationship, the actor normally supposed to enforce agreements (i.e., the government) is obviously part of the agreement, which in turn implies serious commitment problems and a need to go beyond the traditional view of institutions as politically determined rules that are only imposed coercively in a top-down manner (see Sjöstedt 2008). Instead, there is a need to focus on institutions as selfenforcing agreements and as outcomes of a dynamic interaction between the parties involved, where the incentives facing both parties in the interaction is taken into account.1 This chapter takes those incentives as a starting point, then develops a theoretical model and explores the dynamic interaction between ruler and ruled in the fisheries sector in Angola, Namibia, and South Africa. As such, this chapter is firmly rooted in the call in chapter 1, “Introduction: The Comparative Study of Environmental Governance,” for bringing the state back into the analysis of environmental politics and natural resource management. In addition, the explicit comparative approach undertaken here makes this distinct from the case-study approach that dominates the field (the chapters in this book being important exceptions to this rule). The chapter is also firmly rooted in theories from the field of rationalchoice political science and political economy. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section gives a brief account of the current state of African fisheries and the challenges facing Enforcement and Compliance in African Fisheries 267 fishers and the industry at large. Then there is a brief review of...