Transformation through participation: Democratising the human-ocean relationship

Abstract

This chapter situates marine citizenship as a transdisciplinary tool for transforming the human-ocean relationship for sustainability. It considers marine citizens’ views on knowledge, and the role in particular of scientific and local place-based knowledge for marine management, and how knowledge and learning influence and are a part of marine citizenship. Marine citizens, it will be argued, intuitively integrate a range of knowledges and seek participation in ocean governance both through formal procedural decision-making processes and through informal community-building means. In this analysis, the post-normal science approach is invoked, extending the marine environmental peer community to include citizens, and incorporating knowledges and values from outside of academia, in order to create more effective, acceptable and legitimate solutions to marine issues. Viewing all people as having a right to act as a marine citizen asks the question of how accessible marine citizenship is as a political, individual, and collective act. The argument is made that there is an existing knowledge deficit about the right to environmental procedural participation which ocean literacy could address, and that reform is required to enable this democratisation of the human-ocean relationship.