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

Abstract

On a drizzly spring day in 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strolled along the shores of Vancouver Island, filming a video promoting the Oceans Protection Plan, touted by his government as 'the largest investment ever made to protect Canada's coasts and waterways while growing our economy' (Transport Canada, 2020, n.p.). 1 Trudeau was accompanied by Kate Moran, president of a federally funded research institute and non-profit society called Ocean Networks Canada (ONC). In their recorded exchange, Trudeau explained that the Oceans Protection Plan, grounded in science and partnerships with First Nations, is a 'world class' effort to protect the marine environment. In response, Moran assured

Digital ecologies: Materialities, encounters, governance

“…These nonhumans are rendered infrastructural and contribute actively to desired systemic properties such as biodiversity and flood resilience (Barua 2021;Braun 2014;Manaugh 2015;Wakefield and Braun 2019). Dynamic ocean management systems which monitor ecological conditions and the movement of protected species to inform marine management decisions in real-time offer one example of this already in operation (Bakker 2022;Maxwell et al 2015;Ritts 2017;Ritts and Simpson 2022).…”

“…But while digital encounters bring distant wildlife into homes and laboratories around the world, this can have negative consequences, especially in conservation contexts where ‘less interventionist’ technologies like camera traps and drones are used (Rovero and Zimmerman 2016; Sandbrook et al 2018; Wich and Koh 2018). As Kiggell (2021) notes, the increased use of digital remote sensing technologies among ecologists means that less time is spent in the field interacting with implicated communities, which generates impoverished understandings of complex nonhuman lives, including the ways in which they relate to humans (Collard 2018; Parks 2019).…”