Being heard: Thinking through different versions of rationality, epistemological policing and dissonances in marine conservation

Emerging from ethnographic research conducted on the west coast of South Africa, this paper explores the ways in which fishers contrast their experience of fishing prior to the implementation of the Marine Living Resources Act, and the rise of fortress style conservation in fisheries management. Conservation as rhetoric has been used as a powerful means of supporting and justifying fisheries management objectives. The paper argues that fishers engage with their environments in ways that are different from how management understands human–nature relations. As a consequence, fortress style fisheries management and policing disallow fishers to engage with the sea in the ways that are intrinsic to their fishing practices. This results, in many instances, in curtailing the ways in which fishers are allowed to think about and interact with the sea. With the impending implementation of EAF in South Africa and the global call for working with multiple knowledges, the paper calls for relational ways of engaging in conservation.