Online Reporter
Edward Carver
Marine resource conflicts often surface in ways that are both practical and deeply human — when industrial vessels push into coastal waters relied upon by small-scale fishers, when a port is constructed on land meant for mangrove restoration, or when a shipping lane cuts through a marine protected area. These overlapping interests, each with their own urgency, can quickly turn into disputes that ripple across communities and industries.
A new study has laid bare the scale of the issue, identifying more than 1 000 such conflicts across Africa over an 11-year period. It found that nearly 75 percent of these disputes centred on access — who gets to use which spaces, and who controls the resources within them. Published on April 17 in the journal One Earth, the study calls for more inclusive and transparent governance, warning that without this, conflicts could stand in the way of Africa’s sustainability and equity ambitions.
“Ensuring meaningful participation of affected groups is one of the biggest takeaways,” Elizabeth Selig, managing director at the Center for Ocean Solutions at Stanford University in the U.S. and lead author of the study, told Mongabay. “If you embed [these groups] within decision-making processes and are conscious of [future] actions that could affect them, you are more likely to be able to avoid conflict.”
The ocean today has become a space of competing priorities. It is as much about conservation as it is about economic opportunity, and that balance is not always easy to maintain. As Selig and her co-authors note, “The compound impacts of a growing ocean economy, climate-change-associated shifts in marine resources’ availability, and the expansion of spatial conservation measures” increases the risk of conflicts.”
In recent years, the idea of the blue economy has gained ground, especially among coastal nations. It seeks to align economic growth with sustainability and fairness, but in practice, this balance can be difficult to achieve. The African union has already adopted a Blue Economy Strategy, and some countries, including Kenya, have developed their own national frameworks in line with the concept.
“The prominence of the blue economy in regional and national policies across Africa, coupled with rapid ocean development, requires a better understanding of where conflicts occur, who is involved, and the nature of the disputes to find pathways to resolution,” they write.
To better understand these tensions, the study examined marine resource conflicts in 34 coastal African countries between 2008 and 2018. It drew from news reports and academic literature in English, French and Portuguese.
Rather than tracking trends over time, the researchers focused on what lies beneath these disputes — the underlying causes.
Out of the 1,013 cases documented, 73 percent involved disagreements over access to space or resources. These included disputes over fishing grounds, permits, quotas and control of coastal zones. In Ghana, for instance, small-scale fishers pushed for exclusive access to certain fishing areas, seeking protection from industrial vessels. That debate has not stood still — in 2025, the government expanded the zones reserved for small-scale fishers. Other conflicts, though less common, dealt with how space is used — whether an area should be conserved or developed — and how benefits, such as tourism revenue, are shared.
Despite the tensions, most of the conflicts recorded were non-violent. Only 2 percent involved deaths, and those cases were often tied to illegal fishing activities. Interestingly, more than a quarter of the disputes were not related to fishing at all, showing how varied the pressures on marine resources have become. Examples include disagreements between sand miners and governments, or between hotel developers and local communities, as highlighted in an article in The Conversation by Selig and some of her co-authors.
What stands out, however, is how few of these conflicts actually reach resolution. The researchers found that less than one-third were settled during the study period, based on available reports.
“Conflict resolution is not well-studied in the literature for marine conflicts, so our findings represent an initial picture of patterns,” Selig told Mongabay in an email. “Low resolution rates for distribution of benefits and usage of space conflicts point to a need for additional or different approaches for resolving them.”
The study also acknowledges its own limits. Not every conflict makes it into the public record, and some may go unnoticed due to factors such as “journalists’ perceptions of newsworthiness.” Even so, clear patterns emerge.
Among the key drivers identified were illegal fishing, inequitable sharing of benefits, weak governance systems and environmental degradation linked to human activity.
Ifesinachi Okafor-Yarwood, a lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Development at the University of St Andrews in the UK, who was not involved in the study, believes it provides a valuable overview. Writing to Mongabay, she said it “pulls together evidence on marine resource conflicts across a wide range of African coastal contexts, and shows just how widespread and persistent these disputes are. The emphasis on access as the main driver is particularly important because it captures one of the central pressure points in coastal and marine governance.”
At the same time, she noted that the study does not fully account for external forces shaping these conflicts. Global demand for marine resources and activities such as distant-water fishing often lie beyond the control of individual countries, yet they play a major role.
“So while the emphasis on more inclusive governance is important and apt, it probably needs to be read alongside a clearer recognition of external constraints and the fact that marine governance in African contexts operates across multiple levels,” Okafor-Yarwood said. “This underscores the need for greater attention to regional and global governance arrangements that shape outcomes in African marine spaces.”
Selig agreed with this point, describing it as an “excellent point” and acknowledging that “broader structural and historical dynamics beyond national governance play critical roles in shaping access and conflict dynamics in African marine spaces.”
“Our analysis was intentionally focused on documenting patterns in marine resource conflicts, including conflict types, actors and resolution status, based on what is reported in periodical sources,” she added. “Consequently, the set of drivers we analyse reflects those mentioned in reports and is therefore limited.”
Looking ahead, Selig said her team hopes to explore a wider range of drivers in future research. For now, even the data they have collected presents its own challenges. The database is not yet available on a user-friendly platform and does not include events beyond 2018. It took around three years to build, beginning in 2019, before the rise of today’s artificial intelligence tools.
“We would like to have something like the Environmental Justice Atlas that would let people get some information associated with particular conflicts and click on it,” she said. “We don’t have the funding for it now, but there’s many new techniques that would enable us to take this to more recent events, probably in an easier way than we did when we did the study.”
– Mongabay
