The concept of social resilience thrives in studies and policies of fisheries and marine conservation. Associated with the ability of communities to adapt to change, it has spurred debates on social organisation for resilience. Considering its proliferation in maritime studies, the concept of social resilience requires a critical reflection on the ontological assumptions of 'social' and 'community' that undergirds the concept, in particular the idea that communities are place-based. Following a relational ontological approach, this article proposes to explore community as performative network of human and non-human relations acted out in practice. Drawing on insights from ethnographic research in a coastal region in Indonesia, I illustrate the performance of community networks beyond the local scale and how they sustain through the association of social and material elements. These trans-local communities have resisted conservationists' attempts to create resilient (place-based) fishing communities in the region to impede illegal fishing. The case illustrates how a relational approach helps to illuminate what social resilience in a maritime context means in practice. The article aims to contribute to critical social resilience scholarship in maritime studies by drawing out how we may think and explore 'social' and 'community' otherwise and the implications this has for how we look for resilience.

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Formulating adequate responses to pressing socio-ecological challenges requires effective and legitimate knowledge production and use. The academic debate has gradually shifted from a linear model of science–policy relations towards co-productive alternatives. Yet, in practice, the linear model remains lingering. This paper uses a case study of a collaboration between a Dutch research institute and a ministerial department to examine how and why this linear model is so persistent. Our analysis shows the dominance of the linear model in this collaboration, while openings for a more co-productive relationship remain largely unexplored. Our findings illustrate that an important reason for this persistence of the linear model is the lack of a convincing and attractive alternative imaginary of science–policy practices, which defines clear roles and competencies for researchers as well as policy actors involved. We argue this is symptomatic of a wider tendency among both researchers and policy actors to construct science as an obligatory passage point towards policy. However, this tendency not only enables policy actors to offload their responsibility but also fails to capitalise on the opportunities offered by these practices to explicate the politics embedded in and foregrounded by knowledge production. Such an engagement with the politics of knowledge by experts as well as policymakers can encourage more effective and legitimate knowledge production and use.

I would also like to thank my friends Seinab Hussain, Edhy Putra and Andi Uccu who have not only made me feel at home in Makassar, but who have also shared their expertise in Indonesian fisheries as well as in Buginese and Makassarese heritage. Thanks also to Oktami Dewi Artha for accompanying me during one of my island trips, and helping with some translation work. My thanks go out to the ZMT Bremen research group coordinated by Professor Dr Marion Glaser and Dr Sebastian Ferse, who invited me along one of their weeklong fieldwork trips to the Spermonde Islands. During my fieldwork in and around Makassar I have enjoyed the company of ZMT researchers Philipp Gorris, Hauke Kegler, Veronica Breitkopf and our repeated discussions about maritime research. Some of the most influential people, those who had a profound impact on the course of my PhD journey I cannot include in a specific chronological order, as they figure as anonymised interlocutors in the chapters of this thesis. Obviously, they deserve to stand in the spotlights. Without their trust, input and support this very thesis would not have come to be. Among the most prominent are the staff of The Nature Conservancy and their network of local facilitators, the staff of local NGOs Bestari, my different host families along the coast in East Kalimantan, Sabah and the Masalima Archipelago, as well as the captains and travelling partners who allowed me to join them on their voyages across the Makassar Strait. Thanks to Ical, Hany,

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in Indonesia, this article describes a conservation outreach project that attempts to educate and convert local people into coral protectors. Both coral and the sea-dwelling Bajau people appear to be amphibious beings, moving between a changeable land-water interface, and between different, fluidly interwoven ontological constellations. We show that the failure of conservation organizations to recognize the ontologically ambiguous nature of "coral" and "people" translates to a breakdown of outreach goals. Mobilizing the concept of amphibiousness to engage this ambiguity and fluidity, we describe the moving land-water interface as the actual living environment for both coral and people. The notion of amphibiousness, we suggest, has practical and political value, in particular for reconsidering outreach and how it may be reframed as a process involving ontological dialogue. For conservation outreach to become seaworthy, it needs to cultivate an amphibious capacity, capable of moving in-between and relating partly overflowing ways of knowing and being. Providing room for ambiguity, thinking with amphibiousness furthermore encourages suspension of the (Western) tendency to explain the Other, to fix what does not add up. As such, it is of heuristic relevance for the on-going discussions of ontological multiplicity that have proliferated at the intersection between STS and anthropology.