Co-governance and upgrading in the South African small-scale fisheries value chain

This paper identifies new forms of public-private modes of governance for achieving collective forms of value chain upgrading in South African small-scale fisheries. Our analysis focuses on the different stages of implementing the 2012 small-scale fisheries policy designed to promote collective action and enable inter alia small-scale rock lobster fishers to improve rights allocation and the terms of their inclusion in export value chains. The results indicate that collective action by fishers is imperative to achieve upgrading by small-scale fishers in value chains, and that constructive and well defined relations with private as well as extra-transactional actors, like government and NGOs, are essential to the success of collective action as an upgrading strategy. By combining insights from interactive governance and global value chain governance we propose a new analytical framework that goes beyond upgrading alone to better understand the influences of collective action and the role of these extra-transactional actors in the development of small-scale fisheries.