Project Profile: OCEANS PACT
OCEAN Sustainability Pathways for Achieving Conflict Transformation
Who?
| Principal Investigators: | Michael Gilek, Södertörn University, Sweden |
| Partners: | Peter Arbo, University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway, Norway Ronaldo Adriano Christofoletti, Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil Frank Dukes, Rector & Visitors of the University of Virginia, United States Devanathan Parthasarathy, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India Merle Sowman, University of Cape Town, South Africa |
| Sponsors: | São Paulo Research Foundation, Brazil Ministry of Earth Sciences, India The Research Council of Norway, Norway National Research Foundation, South Africa Swedish Research Council for Env, Agric Sci & Spatial Planning, Sweden Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, United States/international National Science Foundation, United States |
What?
| Full Project Title: | OCEAN Sustainability Pathways for Achieving Conflict Transformation |
| Full Call Title: | Oceans2018 |
| Website: |
Why?
| Project Objective: | Life on earth depends on healthy oceans. But our oceans are in decline. There is mounting pressure on finite marine resources because of the increasing number of competing activities, technological advances, and over-exploitation, pollution and climate change. Conflicts about how to harness benefits from marine resources are widespread, intensifying, and unfolding in unprecedented ways. There are long-standing disputes between activities like fisheries, and oil and gas exploitation. New conflicts are emerging, e.g., sea-level rise could displace millions on low-lying coasts, and submerge some small island nations. Ocean conflicts reflect deep-rooted struggles over ownership, rights, benefits, and human-nature relationships on our Blue Planet. Surprisingly, ocean conflict resolution is an under-developed field of scholarship and practice. OCEANS PACT argues that ocean sustainability prospects depend on building tailor-made capabilities to analyze, productively manage, and where possible transform ocean conflicts. We construct a co-designed, trans-disciplinary, action research approach. We aim to develop deep insights about diverse ocean conflicts through real-world collaboration of context-specific research teams that include stakeholder partners, social and natural scientists, and conflict resolution experts. Our comparative analysis focuses on conflicts that traverse the Global North and South, in South Africa, India, Brazil, Norway/Barents Sea, Baltic Sea and United States. We investigate how existing conflict resolution practices help or hinder ocean sustainability. We examine how formal interventions, e.g., law, and informal practices, e.g., negotiation, can be harnessed to unlock the transformative potential of conflict resolution. The new knowledge gained will be used to develop and test ocean conflict resolution tools and practices. OCEANS PACT will generate significant scientific, socio-political and practice benefits in our case studies, and enable scaling up of insights, tools and conflict resolution practices that foster global ocean sustainability. |
| Call Objective: | This CRA call aims to contribute to the overall challenge of ocean sustainability, using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #14 (Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development) as the overall framework. This call encourages global partnerships of academics and non-academics to address one or more of the following topics: 1) Pathways toward a sustainable and equitable use of oceans, 2) accounting for and minimizing impacts of global change. |
Where?
| Regions: | |
| Countries: | Brazil, India, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, United States of America (USA) |
When?
| Duration: | 36 |
| Call Date: | 29 October 2018 |
| Project Award Date: | 12 February 2020 |
