BLUE POLITICAL ECOLOGIES
Co-hosted by Synne Movik (Norwegian University of Life Sciences), Emilie Wiehe (University of Guelph), Mialy Andriamahefazafy (University of Geneva), Marleen Schutter (Worldfish & University of Washington) and Mark Lamont (Open University), with support from Noé Mendoza, NMBU
WELCOME
Virtual workshop on Blue Political Ecologies 8th and 9th November
We would like to welcome you to a virtual workshop on blue political ecologies, which will take place from the 8th and 9th of November. The event is co-hosted by Synne Movik (Norwegian University of Life Sciences),Emilie Wiehe (University of Guelph), Mialy Andriamahefazafy (University of Geneva), Marleen Schutter (Worldfish & University of Washington) and Mark Lamont (Open University), with support from Noé Mendoza, NMBU
There will be four sessions based on short presentations that you are welcome to attend live (please follow the link below), or you can engage with the presentations asynchronously once they are recorded and made available (1-2 days after the live session). There will be a comments box where you can share your questions, thoughts, and reflections.
SESSION ABSTRACT
The oceans are being framed increasingly as a site of degradation and in need of conservation (Bennett, 2019; Gray, 2018), while simultaneously being promoted as the new economic frontier through blue economy frameworks and discourses of blue growth (Ertör and Hadjimichael 2020; Silver & Campbell, 2018). Critical scholars have drawn attention to conflict surrounding marine space and marine resources (e.g. Bavinck et al, 2018; Menon et al, 2016), the scalar politics of marine governance (Campbell, 2007; Gruby et al, 2013), fisheries politics, access and the neoliberalization of fisheries (Mansfield, 2004; Andriamahefazafy & Kull, 2019), the role of knowledge and technology in producing the marine environment (Gray, 2018; Drakopulos, 2019), and the political ecologies of emerging blue economies (Marleen & Hicks, 2019; Carver, 2019; Bond, 2019), to name a few. More recently, as the blue economy continues to be pushed as a development framework, scholars and practitioners alike are calling for increased attention to issues of blue justice – though there are signs that the term is being appropriated by powerful international actors, diluting it and rendering it apolitical. Political ecology thus provides useful insights to make visible the political in marine governance and the blue economy and to examine power relations inherent in these realms. The blue political ecologies workshops in this series of sessions aim to explore how power and politics, access and resource conflict continue to shape marine resource use and governance. Papers and discussions in this workshop also aim to further bridge research-practitioner gaps, particularly with regards to furthering blue justice aims.
PRESENTATIONS
- NGO Transitions in a Post-Aid Setting: The Case of Thai labour NGOs in the ‘Modern Slavery’ Fisheries Reformm | Alin Kadfak et al.
- Equity and colonialism in tuna fisheries management | Sinan Hussain
- Capacity tuna fishing transfer agreement: benefits for the Indian Ocean, Tanzanian economy, and people | Asiya Maskaeva et al.
- Navigating dependency and resistance: unpacking the conundrum of managing offshore fisheries in Madagascar | Mialy Andriamahefazafy
- The linked futures of fisherfolk and the city: Transforming in and with Mumbai | D Parthasarathy
- Marine Spatial Injustices and Resource conflicts in South Africa: Case studies from the Western Cape Province’ | Mafaniso Hara and Moenieba Isaacs
- Spatial Justice in the Coastal and Marine Environment: A Case Study from Skafandi Bay, Iceland | Maria Wilke
- We are the oceans, we are the people!’ Fisher people’s struggles for blue justice | Irmak Ertör
- Blue Growth and Blue Justice: Ten Risks and Solutions for the Ocean Economy | Nathan Bennett
- Unpacking notions of justice among blue economy actors: a case study of Mauritius | Emilie Wiehe
- In the same storm but not in the same boat. Fisheries management, scalar politics, and blue (in)justice within and beyond the Joal-Fadiouth marine protected area, Senegal | Louis Pille-Schneider, Ragnhild Overå and Frode Sundnes
- Politics of resource rights and conservation of coastal sand dune ecosystem, India | Indhusmathi G
Mobilizing Political ecology seeds to advance equity and justice for oceans and people
- Protecting 30% of marine area will not address systemic problems of biodiversity loss | Hugh Govan and Arju Mohammad
- Moving back and forth between critical and constructive engagements on equity and justice in marine conservation and the blue economy | Nathan Bennett
- Advancing equity and justice for oceans and people: reflecting on the role of the state in aligning policy across scales | Marleen Schutter and Mialy Andriamahefazafy
These will be followed by a live discussion session focusing on how to mobilise for greater equity and justice (coordinated by Mialy Andriamahefazafy and Marleen Schutter).
The session will be kicked off by three short talks, which will provide the basis for a discussion on how we can draw on pol political ecology to advance equity and justice. We encourage you to join this live session, using the link provided below.
Please do not hesitate to get in touch with the co-host Emilie Wiehe ewiehe@uoguelph.ca should you have questions and comments, and we really hope that you will engage with the issues that are being raised, either through the live discussion, or through leaving comments, questions and reflections in the comments box on the website.
The workshop co-organisers have sketched out a few key issues and questions that emerged out of the live sessions in November. Please do share your thoughts and comments, and feel free to add further questions. If you are responding to one of the questions below, when entering your response in the comments box, please specify which question you are responding to.
Decolonisation: Why is advancing ocean equity so challenging at Regional Fisheries Management Organisations, and what can be done about it? How can ‘decolonisation’ be mainstreamed in fisheries governance?
Spatial justice: How can we mediate between competing claims to coastal space? What does the concept of ‘voluminous justice’ add that is not already covered by the notion of ‘spatial justice?’
Blue justice: How ‘plural’ should justice be? Is there a scope for including ‘sustainable’ or ‘reasonable’ use as a part of a plural idea of justice, and how does it tie in with the notion of a human right to livelihood? ‘Blue spatial justice’- what is the potential of bringing together ‘blue’ and ‘spatial’ justice in one concept, and how helpful would it be in analysing coastal conflicts and advancing justice?
Advancing justice drawing on political ecology: What are the needs of civil society organisations in terms of evidence/results, and how can we improve inputs from academics in on-going state policy making?
Spatial justice: How can we mediate between competing claims to coastal space? What does the concept of ‘voluminous justice’ add that is not already covered by the notion of ‘spatial justice?’
My use of the term ‘voluminous injustice’ builds on that of spatial (in)justice, which has a long history in human geography scholarship (see e.g., Soja, 2013). Increasingly being taken out at sea under the umbrella of ‘Blue Justice’, spatial (in)justice is finding a particularly strong resonance in research conducted on artisanal / small-scale fisheries across geographies (see e.g., Jentoft et al, 2022). In my presentation and the publication that I am in the process of developing, I am grounding blue justice in the Senegalese postcolonial seascape around the ongoing implementation of MPAs since the mid-2000s and their impacts on artisanal fisheries. My use of ‘voluminous injustice’, not indented at adding yet another layer to an already rich spatial vocabulary, rather seeks to contribute refining understandings of (unjust) oceanic spatialities.
The motivation for my use of the terms ‘voluminous injustice’ is twofold. First, floating in the stream of, for instance, Christopher Bear’s ‘assembled sea’ (2013), as well as Philip Steinberg & Kimberley Peters’ prompt to “[give] depth to volume through oceanic thinking” with their ‘wet ontology’ (2015), my contribution on ‘voluminous injustice’ is intended at giving more salience to the often-overlooked – or at least comparatively understudied – vertical dimension of ocean space. This is in my view so also in political ecology scholarship concerned with fisheries management / marine conservation, where ocean space tends to remain envisioned first and foremost as two-dimensional. A view of ocean space in line with the topographic approach and de fait area-based nature of MPAs; the very type of intervention that yet often comes under the hatchet of ocean-concerned political ecologists.
Second, my juxtaposition of the term ‘voluminous’ with ‘injustice’ is not merely motivated by warranted greater attention to oceanic materiality as previously noted; it metaphorically alludes, yet also materially, albeit a different materiality – one of fishing gear, fuel, etc. – to another meaning of the former term. In the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998), for instance, ‘voluminous’ is defined as “occupying or containing much space; large in volume […]”, where ‘volume’ is being defined as “[t]he amount of space that a substance or object occupies, or that is enclosed in within a container, especially when great; The amount or quantity of something, especially when great; (A volume of / volumes of) a certain, typically large amount of something”. My second use of ‘voluminous’ alludes to the largeness of the protracted spatial injustice(s) artisanal fisherfolk are faced with at sea.
I ground ‘voluminous injustice’ in the findings of my research around the Joal-Fadiouth MPA in Senegal. One of my points of discussion is that a two-dimensional view of ocean space – evidenced in fisheries management through the implementation of MPAs – ignores the complexities of, and ocean-borne interactions within Senegalese artisanal fisheries. I seek with the preceding to direct attention to the spatial and indeed voluminous conflicts – here alluding to my first note on the depth and verticality of the ocean volume – between drift gillnet (active gear) fishers and fish trap and/or bottom set gillnet (passive gear) fishers, who not merely compete for the horizontality of ocean space but also for its verticality in their different practices of and in the ocean in search for different piscine animals.
For another, the protracted and sheer size of the spatial injustice(s) that Senegalese artisanal fisheries are experiencing – please bear with my simplification of deeply complex human-nonhuman relations under one single label – vis-à-vis industrial fisheries due to the very material means of fishing underpins my second note on voluminous, as a quantifier. That is however not to say that Senegalese artisanal fisheries do not have a substantial impact on marine ecosystems. Rather, my argument is that MPAs – the currently privileged fisheries management intervention advocated for through much-deconstructed yet still prevailing triple-win discourses (Chaigneau & Brown, 2016), remain, along with other imported technocratic fisheries management discourses and interventions (Kolding & van Zwieten, 2011), at the surface of overfishing off Senegal. Such interventions ignore and arguably detract attention from the multiple layers of the problem, not least unchecked industrial fisheries, which remain mostly unbothered in their operations.
The preceding underpins my use of the terms ‘voluminous injustice’, which I conceive of as a heuristic for taking forward dialogues around important and protracted forms of blue spatial injustices across geographies.