Marieke Norton

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Cape Town

Traditionally, seafood assessments and subsequent ratings have guided choice and responsible sourcing of sustainable seafood based primarily on environmental concerns, with limited to no consideration to multi-faceted human dimensions that form an integral part of these complex social-ecological systems. For wild-capture marine fisheries around the...

The contribution of human activities to climate change is well understood. Yet the integration of climate change considerations into local decision making tools designed to govern activities affecting the environment, such as Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs), remains underdeveloped and inconsistently applied for proposed policies, programs,...

Based on research conducted by myself and colleagues as part of the Southern Cape Interdisciplinary Fisheries Research Project, I present an overview of residents’ perspectives on the Stilbaai Marine Protected Area, located on the Southern Cape coast of South Africa. Currently, South Africa’s marine governance sector is often fraught with politicki...

This story is concerned with the intersection of governance, stewardship, care taking, and extraction. It is centred on insights gained through repeated encounters with bait prawns during 7 years of fieldwork in Stilbaai, South Africa. These prawns are intended as angling bait, but they are entangled in a host of complications—or relations—the disc...

Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa’s Western Cape province, we suggest ways in which marine resource law enforcement activities can be evaluated at the level of individual fisheries compliance inspectors, to gain a more accurate understanding of the state of marine resource law enforcement. We show that these individual as...

The introduction of the Marine Living Resources Act (MLRA) in South Africa in 1998 had a profound effect on the nature of marine resource use and extraction in the province known as the Western Cape. Working at the nexus of state, nature, science and publics, marine compliance inspectors and the MLRA and subsequent policies have been widely critici...

In the [first] decade, management of the hake resource has been confounded by uncertainties surrounding the size of the resource. There were two conflicting estimates of abundance, depending on whether the survey or the commercial [data] was used, complicating the recommendation of a [total allowable catch]. The survey index indicates … that the po...

The Cape Snoek, or Thyrsites atun, is a species of fish that has a significant presence in the history of the Western Cape and the development of Cape Town. The snoek is a lively creature that is historically, culturally, economically, and ecologically active in the Western Cape. I argue that in the case of the Cape snoek, the fish and the Cape are...

This article looks at the manner in which different parties engage with the issue of fishing rights on the inter-personal and public levels over the issue of fishing rights allocation in South Africa. Taking the historic fishing village of Kassiesbaai on the Cape's south coast as the case-site, this article outlines the profound effect that impleme...