CHAPTER 7 . Remaking Oceans Governance: Critical Perspectives on Marine Spatial Planning

Smart oceans governance: Reconfiguring capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations

“…By focusing on the case of ONC, our analysis has shown how the functional integration of diverse aspects of the state apparatus -from marine mammal risk assessment to Indigenous community engagement -can proceed through the socio-technical regimes of smart oceans governance. The result, in our case, is a more state-centric account of contemporary ocean governance politics, but one that retains the important attention to novel third-party actors and distributed technological networks featured in recent geographical work in this area (e.g., Drakopolus et al, 2022;Fairbanks et al, 2019;Havice et al, 2022). On the west coast of Canada, the rapid growth of smart oceans governance must be understood in a political economic context characterised by the expansion of extractive infrastructures placing inten-sified social and ecological pressures on unceded and waters.…”

Marine environment and sustainable development governance

“…This also creates a need for research-based evaluations that can make the trade-offs among alternative recovery scenarios explicit (Ingeman et al, 2019) and the distributional outcomes of policies and maritime economy practices visible. The research community should become engaged in research and experimentation for a reorientation of marine governance that foregrounds concerns such as community, equity and difference (Fairbanks et al, 2019). NOTES 1. www .unenvironment .org/ explore -topics/ oceans -seas/ what -we -do/ working -regional -seas/ regional -seas -programmes/ regional -seas, accessed 4 March 2022.…”

“…The awareness of exacerbating crises and the simultaneous promise of new possibilities has strengthened interest in new, improved governance of the oceans (Lubchenko et al, 2016;Bennett et al, 2019;Havice and Zalik, 2019;Fairbanks et al, 2019;Nash et al, 2020). Progress has been made in regulating the exploitation of marine mammals, in fisheries management, the prevention of pollution and in the protection and restoration of habitats as pointed out by Duarte et al (2020) who further outline pathways for substantial restoration of marine ecosystem health.…”

Saildrones and Snotbots in the Blue Anthropocene: Sensing technologies, multispecies intimacies, and scientific storying

“…The oceans have fewer fish, coral, phytoplankton, and sea mammals but more traffic and poachers; they are also populated with semi-autonomous sensors that cruise the water column under the sea, diving under the ice, exploring sea floors and mounts, bobbing and sailing on the surface, and peering down with computer vision from satellites. These sensors carry expectations and aspirations of finding, filtering, and controlling signals made static by ocean noise and technological limitations (Fairbanks et al., 2019; Lehman, 2017; O’Grady, 2019).…”