ALBERT

Description: Crimes at sea—blue crimes—can have devastating impacts on small-scale fishing communities. Increasing calls to address “blue crimes” demand more research to address the drivers, patterns, actors and impacts of criminal activities in society and the oceans. This research and policy agenda, however, is not without risks as it might impact individual small-scale fishers and their communities, exacerbate existing inequalities and contribute to the criminalization of small-scale fishing practices. This paper discusses the risks and ethical challenges faced by a blue crimes research agenda to improve rather than worsen the plight of small-scale fishers. We identify eight inter-related ethical considerations: (i) pay attention to context and forms of involvement, (ii) cultivate reciprocal relationships and collaborations, (iii) evaluate and minimize risks, (iv) integrate storytelling and careful listening, (v) challenge reductionism, (vi) represent people, places, and practices carefully, (vii) follow communication ethics and (viii) consider the legal and policy implications. In light of a review of the literature on blue crimes and small-scale fisheries, we point to the need for ethically grounded research that is committed to reducing the associated burdens on small-scale fishers and their communities.

Description: Responding to societal challenges requires an understanding of how institutional change happens or does not happen. In the context of flood risk reduction, a central impediment of transformational change is a struggle over how public participation is understood and practiced. Risk institutions are often portrayed as resistant to change, which overlooks the individuals within institutions who struggle to implement innovative power-sharing approaches/arrangements. Using two rounds of qualitative interviews spread over 5 years, this research identifies factions within the risk sector—those who view participation as awareness raising and those who are struggling to make participation part of a wider commitment to power-sharing: a group that, for the purpose of this analysis, we call “mavericks.” Through focus on how mavericks struggle for change, this analysis uncovers tensions that arise as individuals attempt to alter prevailing knowledge-practices. The findings highlight the importance of experiential learning, active listening, and the alteration of space. By applying a relational conceptualisation, we explore how mavericks advocate for relationship building, which alters spaces of public participation and, in that way, lays the foundation for transformational social innovations. The conclusions offer flood risk researchers perspective on the institutional struggles that preconfigure how frontrunner projects are or are not able to facilitate the community participation needed to successfully implement societal transformations.

Description: The Pacific region of Colombia, like many sparsely populated places in developing countries, has been imagined as empty in social terms, and yet full in terms of natural resources and biodiversity. These imaginaries have enabled the creation of frontiers of land and sea control, where the state as well as private and illegal actors have historically dispossessed Afro-descendant and indigenous peoples. This paper contributes to the understanding of territorialisation in the oceans, where political and legal framings of the sea as an open-access public good have neglected the existence of marine social processes. It shows how Afro-descendant communities and non-state actors are required to use the language of resources, rather than socio-cultural attachment, to negotiate state marine territorialisation processes. Drawing on a case study on the Pacific coast of Colombia, we demonstrate that Afro-descendant communities hold local aquatic epistemologies, in which knowledge and the production of space are entangled in fluid and volumetric spatio-temporal dynamics. However, despite the social importance of aquatic environments, they were excluded from Afro-descendants' collective territorial rights in the 1990s. Driven by their local aquatic epistemologies, coastal communities are reclaiming authority over the seascape through the creation of a marine protected area. We argue that they have transformed relations of authority at sea to ensure local access and control, using state institutional instruments to subvert and challenge the legal framing of the sea as an open access public good. As such, this marine protected area represents a place of resistance that ironically subjects coastal communities to disciplinary technologies of conservation.