Role of science production in exploring equity under future ocean
conditions
Science-informed future fore-sighting initiatives in ocean and marine
studies are arenas in which visions of greater equity as central
elements of desirable ocean future are increasingly being included (see
Merrie et al., 2018). Ways to improve inclusivity and diversity of
equity as concept, process and outcome are being actively explored. For
example, Raudsepp-Hearne, Peterson et al. (2020)’s scenario development
approach is specifically designed to encompass the less tangible
features of political economy, heterogeneity in values, and cultural
diversity to identify system characteristics that would offer more
sustainable and just futures. One reason for this is the increasing
trend towards interdisciplinary ocean and marine science and integrated
solution-oriented research (Visbeck, 2018). This trend allows inclusion
of disciplines that have long explored issues of equity (e.g. social
sciences) which make equity more likely to be explicitly considered and
approaches that allow equity issues that surface more likely to be
employed (e.g. co-production techniques). Furthermore, system sciences
as part of knowledge production in ocean and marine science may include
issues of equity, by exploring management of systems under historical
conditions, Indigenous knowledge and approaches and issues of power and
decision making (Hill et al., 2012). New areas of development and growth
such as the Blue Economy are another avenue where equity is explicitly
raised in ocean and marine studies (Bennett et al., 2019, Österblom et
al., 2020).
The SDGs “represent today’s most relevant globally negotiated normative
agenda for sustainability” and “a turning point in defining what
sustainability means on a global scale” (Schneider et al., 2019). The
development of the SDGs was aimed at improving inclusivity and diversity
in response to critiques of the previous Millennium Development Goals,
and equity as a normative goal received much greater attention. Yet the
SDGs and the pathways to realising them still largely avoids requiring a
fundamental re-alignment of social structures and institutions in which
inequity is often embedded (Battersby, 2017). As we interpret Battersby,
the focus on ‘outcome’ equity without also addressing concept and
process issues of equity means that equity in an enduring sense, enabled
by the necessary structural changes to inequitable process and
institutions, is not likely to be fully realised. Furthermore, while the
SDGs recognise that equity is an essential pathway to sustainability,
the system transformation that this would require is not addressed, thus
how equity is to be achieved is far less clear (Sexsmith and McMichael,
2015). The SDGs are a high-level aspirational vision of a desirable
society but lack guidance in how to address conflicts in values and
trade-offs in decision making across targets and outcomes to achieve
that vision (Schneider et al., 2019).