Prof Moenieba Isaacs

Professor Moenieba Isaacs is the Academic Coordinator and senior researcher at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of Western Cape. Her research areas focus is on understanding the social and political processes of blue justice for small-scale fishers, gender, fish as part of the food system, fisheries reform, Marine Protected Areas, blue economy and biodiversity conservation in South Africa and southern Africa. She has worked extensively with fishing communities, CBOs and NGOs in Southern Africa and internationally to find policy solutions to the problems to the social differentiation in fishing communities. She is an engaged and reflective scholar and always working on finding creative ways to engage with social processes, decision making and policymaking in the context of diverse civil society interests.

Professor Isaacs is the lead  PI on creating systemic redesign of the wet and dry conservation sector in Southern Africa called Living Landscapes in Action. Country coordinator for Small-scale fisheries (SSF) project on Vulnerability to Viability (V2V). She is a team member of the transformative social innovations in the governance of small-scale fisheries in the Indian ocean region. She was co-PI on African food systems and Covid-19 PLAAS – one-year action-oriented project entitled ‘The Impacts of Covid-19 Responses on the Political Economy of African Food Systems’.

Professor Isaacs formed part of the UN Committee on Food Security’s High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE) on the Role of Sustainable Fisheries and Aquaculture for Food Security and Nutrition 2014. She was part of the expert team organised by United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to unpack the notion of fisheries crime in February 2016 and is a director of the research group PescaDolus developing frameworks for fisheries crime internationally. In 2016, she worked with a team to review the implementation of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Governance of Tenure in Land, Fisheries, Forestry and Indigenous Communities for the Civil Society Mechanism (CSM). In 2024, she formed part of Scientific Advisory Committee for the World Wildlife Crime Report 2024.

Small-scale fisheries management and rights, Individual Transfer Quotas (ITQs)

• PhD on the implementation of new fisheries policies in four South African fishing communities, University of the Western Cape, 2004
• MPhil, University of the Western Cape