Abstract
Marine and coastal governance systems are increasingly challenged by the need to reconcile biodiversity conservation, livelihood security, economic development, and social equity. These challenges are particularly visible in small-scale fisheries and Marine Protected Area (MPA) governance, where multiple actors, institutions, and interests overlap within the same coastal and marine spaces. While existing fisheries, commons, and marine conservation scholarship has generated important insights into institutional design, collective action, co-management, and participation, less attention has been given to how multiple forms of power operate through actor interactions across overlapping fisheries and MPA governance systems, particularly in West African contexts and over time. This cumulative thesis examines how power dynamics and actor interactions shape outcomes in the long-term governance of fisheries and MPA in Senegal. It brings together three interrelated papers that move from conceptual analysis to comparative empirical investigation and temporal explanation. The first paper reviews how power has been conceptualized in fisheries and conservation governance literature in Sub-Saharan Africa. The second paper examines how power operates through actor interactions in fisheries and MPA governance in Saint Louis and Sangomar, Senegal. The third paper analyses how power relations and institutional arrangements have evolved over time in response to co-management reforms, MPA expansion, conservation interventions, offshore oil and gas developments, and broader Blue Economy dynamics. The thesis adopts a qualitative research design. It draws on a structured literature review, semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, Net-Map exercises, participant observation, document analysis, and follow-up field engagement. Empirical fieldwork was conducted in Saint Louis and Sangomar, two coastal governance contexts that share a national institutional framework but differ in terms of fishing intensity, local authority structures, institutional coordination, conservation histories, and emerging political-economic pressures. Analytically, the thesis combines the four dimensions of power: power-over, power-to, power-with, and power-within, with Gaventa’s Power Cube framework to examine how power operates across actor relationships, governance spaces, forms of influence, and institutional processes. The findings show that fisheries and MPA governance outcomes are not produced by formal institutions alone, but through the ways institutions are enacted, negotiated, contested, and transformed by actors. Power-over remains visible through state authority, traditional leadership, conservation interventions, and unequal control over resources and decision-making. However, power-to, power-with, and power-within are also central to understanding how actors build alliances, mobilize knowledge, claim legitimacy, resist exclusion, and influence governance processes. The comparison between Saint Louis and Sangomar demonstrates that similar national governance frameworks may produce different local outcomes depending on actor relationships, local histories, customary authority, institutional coordination, and configurations of legitimacy and influence. The thesis further shows that fisheries and MPA governance in Senegal have undergone significant transformation. Since the expansion of decentralization, co-management, and marine conservation initiatives, governance has become increasingly layered and fragmented. More recently, offshore oil and gas developments and Blue Economy strategies have intensified competition over marine space and introduced new actors, claims, and distributional tensions. These transformations have created new opportunities for participation and collaboration, but have also reinforced inequalities affecting small-scale fishers, women fish processors, migrant fishers, and other less powerful actors. Overall, the thesis contributes to fisheries governance, marine conservation, commons governance, and political ecology by developing a relational, power-sensitive, and historically grounded understanding of marine governance. Its main contribution lies in showing how governance outcomes emerge through the interaction of formal institutions, informal authority, actor relationships, and evolving power configurations. By placing power and actor interactions at the center of the analysis, the thesis advances a more nuanced understanding of why governance outcomes differ across contexts and how fisheries and MPA governance systems change over time.