Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on colonial legal impositions over marine environments, exploring how centralised marine governance frameworks emerged within colonial contexts and considering the continuing influence of this history within contemporary fisheries governance.

Paper long abstract:

European colonisation played a fundamental role in marine dispossession and the entrenchment of unequal and state-dominated marine governance regimes across diverse bodies of water. The imposition of discriminatory legal frameworks was fundamental to this process. Yet, law was not only a tool of European domination but also a resource to contest colonial impositions and advance local interests. Legal struggles on the ground shaped access to and authority over coasts, waters, and marine resources, which then produced disparate challenges, restrictions, and transformations of maritime activities and governance within and outside of colonial structures.

Drawing from the histories of fisheries governance in coastal Ghana and Lake Malawi in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this paper focuses on the legal contests that emerged during British colonial rule surrounding access to fisheries and the rights to regulate fishing activities. These contests played out in colonial courts and prompted colonial regulatory interventions, which worked—on the books at least—to construct colonial governments as the principal custodian over marine resources and the ultimate arbiter in fisheries disputes. This provided the foundations for centralised marine governance, but such governance remained only one of a range of factors that influenced the commercial and technological decisions of resource users.

Drawing from the legal and environmental histories of Ghana and Lake Malawi, this paper will examine how colonial legal impositions within marine spaces formed just one part of a plurality and patchwork of fisheries regulatory regimes, which continues to influence fisheries governance throughout the globe to this day.