Discussion
Oceans are acknowledged as a domain where considerable inequity exists
in terms of benefits that are generally accumulated by a few and yet
costs often borne by the most vulnerable (Österblom et al., 2020). Over
the coming decades as trends associated with climate change (Pörtner et
al., 2019), and the great ‘blue acceleration’ both continue to grow, we
run the risk of existing equity issues being magnified and growing more
urgent, rather than moving towards resolution. Globally, regionally, and
locally, our future plans for the oceans need to consider equity in a
much broader way than has been done to date. As highlighted in the
recent Blue Paper by the High Level Panel for A Sustainable Ocean
Economy “Shifting a historical trajectory of persistent and increasing
inequities will require strong leadership, inclusive governance and
long-term planning that starts with a commitment to equity as integral
to a sustainable ocean economy and relationships within and across
nations” (Österblom et al., 2020). Issues of ocean equity are,
therefore, not challenges that the marine research sector can solve
alone, however, as a research community we can start to make the changes
needed to achieve more sustainable ocean futures with improved equity
outcomes.
The process of engaging with these questions of equity provoked
significant personal and collective reflection amongst the co-authorship
team concerning both the way equity is conceptualised and considered
within the sample of futures science for the oceans, and the way it was
practiced within our own research co-production for this manuscript. We
distil these below and highlight some of the key lessons we will aim to
take forward in future work.
For the involved Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and their
communities, the central understandings flow from Sutej Hugu’s
understandings which he described to the authorship team as summarised
below.
“When Indigenous governance of seas and oceans has (had) the time
and space to operate within it is own scales and manner, it is often an
inter-species compact building on strict laws of the sea as defined in
the Indigenous governance of how humans belong with the sea. The sea and
the ocean is a living, providing being which should not be under any
circumstances angered or abused.Equity is building on an understanding of deep interconnections
with species and humans as manifest for example in Taiwan between the
Tao and noble black-wing flying fish, Hirundichthys rondeletiid, or any
other deep relation across the world on these profound connections. They
form the basis of traditional concepts of equity that have since, for a
number of reasons, including colonial process, self-destruction of these
values and systems and imposed power structures, been lost or survived
to varying degrees. However, it is important to realize that such
systems have been in place and delivered endemic notions of equity as a
part of the Indigenous governance of the seas historically, and in part
today.”
Small scale fleets and harvesters (Isaacs et al., n.d) are often the
keepers of remaining equity management and co-existence mechanisms but
are also mostly affected by the large fleets for example through
exclusion of quota allocations, destruction of habitats and stocks by
trawling fleets and other issues. Whilst care has to be taken to
investigate each small-scale fishery case on their own, we can learn
from each case and global solidarity and unity for diverse indigenous
and smaller scale fisheries can be found across continents (Isaacs et
al., n.d), traditional systems (Mustonen and Huusari, 2020) and globally
(Mustonen et al., Submitted) in this issue.
Equity is more than achieving material outcomes or
implementing processes: Addressing equity is coupled with achieving
the SDGs but to be enduring, equity must focus on more than just
outcomes or process. It is also about context, including the values,
power, accountability and capacity of decisions and actions, and
awareness of and reflection upon these things (McKeon, 2017). This was
almost unanimously recognised by the papers included in this analysis,
particularly about knowledge systems, the capacity required, and the
degree of agency held. Equity may also be countervailing. This is
illustrated in ‘Food for all’ in which greater equity is achieved
materially by providing greater access to fish stocks for small-scale
subsistence fishers but which may be at the cost of localised depletion
of fish stocks. Acknowledging this complexity and supporting
decision-making for situations when equity and sustainability cannot
both be achieved is lacking in the SDGs (Sexsmith and McMichael, 2015).
While universally-declared normative frameworks have come a long way in
accepting the need for equity, the mechanisms required to achieve
equity, including fundamental challenges to current systems,
institutions, power arrangements and values with potentially
uncomfortable trade-offs and conflicts are less tangible. Furthermore,
equity can never be finally achieved, it is always in a dynamic state
(Boyle, 1993); to be equitable is to shift and change to share the
balance of power and consequences.
Equity is inherently relational and morally
grounded: Equity has critical process dimensions and the pursuit of
its needs to reflect the foundational, dynamic, and relational cultural
and political context in which what is equitable is defined. The need
for inclusion of multiple knowledge systems alongside Western science
knowledge with which to understand changing oceans and the changing
relationships communities have with oceans was recognised in several
papers. If we discuss the ocean we want, and would like to see, we then
need progress on all sectors and issues to arrive in a place of
restitutive rights and justice, and equity. But, even then, which is of
course reflected in the many Indigenous and traditional worldviews,
equity will not only be about rights, or benefits, rather, also
co-dependency and ”moral” responsibility to maintain good relations with
other species, the ocean and the planet. For example, in New Zealand
legal standing as personhood has been used a basis for establishing
rights of parts of the natural world but – further to that - for
formalising relationality between peoples and rivers, as well as
guardianship under Māori culture and tradition (Hsiao, 2012, Argyrou and
Hummels, 2019). This is resonating through the compact between species
that is, for example, still maintained in Taiwan between Tao people and
noble black-wing flying fish, Hirundichthys rondeletiid . Equity
is therefore not only about rights and undoing of past wrongs, it is
also about our responsibilities and renewal of responsible behaviour,
from daily (Isaacs et al., n.d) to planetary scales (Mustonen et al.,
Submitted) in trying to undo the massive destruction of the past
centuries.
Imbedded inequity cannot be overcome by more of the
same: Equity as written in the SDGs is problematic because it does not
address how we achieve the social and system change required. Rather, it
presumes that the systems that created and embedded inequity will
somehow be able to reverse it (Winkler and Williams 2017, Fukuda‐Parr
2019). This lack of reckoning with the imbedded nature of some
inequities is illustrated in many of the papers examined in this
analysis in which these are acknowledged as needing to be overcome
without including pathways or actions to enable the restitution, rights,
capacity building and capital some groups may require in order to be
able to overcome historical and structural factors which may reinforce
inequities. This is illustrated by the contributive role of, and indeed
reinforcement of, existing social inequalities by the COVID19 pandemic
and the effects of the responding state-based health measures and
associated economic crisis (Ahmed et al., 2020). Further illustrating
this, Grazia Feyerabend, long-time director of the Indigenous and
Community Conserved Area Consortium (ICCA) has identified in equity
discussions how modern solutions justify countries to continue to do
little or nothing on issues such as pollution. Proper ’governance and
management units’ which she sees as the crux of the matter should flow
from principles such as subsidiarity, historical continuity, appropriate
capacities, and fairness, but also ecological integrity and meaning
(Mustonen et al., Submitted). Feyerabend (cited in Mustonen et al.,
Submitted) has often been doubtful that these puzzles can be solved with
the “chainsaw of national legislation and rules applicable equally, top
down, to very different conditions and realities”. Modern governance
has implied often presumed authority, diffused and unclear
responsibility and little to no accountability for a great part of the
oceans. Small-scale fishers’ experiences are a direct evidence of this
process (Isaacs et al., n.d).
Future oceans science must change to support pathways to
more equitable futures: There is a strong commitment in the
marine-science community to engage with the concept of equity, but there
is still much work to be done and it will be ongoing. As is clear from
the analysis, in a couple of instances equity is barely addressed, in
some cases engagement with the concept is still superficial or limited
to technocratic solutions, but in others there is a clear commitment to
on-going learning and change. The Future Seas process revealed to us
that the values deeply embedded in science and knowledge production are
not necessarily equitable or enabling of equity inquiry, as acknowledged
more broadly (Ford et al., 2016). We observed the challenges to
inclusivity of multiple voices in co-design and production of these
science papers arising from a range of institutional characteristics,
namely: the ‘expert’ peer review process; the requirement for
referencing published ideas from predominantly Western and scientific
literature; the specific disciplinary framing of future challenges and
drivers; the “echo chamber” effect of co-authors holding (mostly)
like-minded views; and the academic focus on ideas with limited
participation from those involved in implementation (e.g. policy,
government, public). We recognise that these are fundamental and
structural issues that could not have been avoided here but are
challenges for the future production of science. Moreover, there is a
significant gap in training and education and financial support in
science to prepare scientists to welcome and value different approaches
and develop capability for thinking about equity at all levels and
stages of research. Co-design and co-production seem to present
promising ways forward to explore issues in more depth and breadth but
perhaps there is a fundamental change in how we move forward, not as
experts seeking answers separate from ourselves but as reflective
practitioners inviting and working with others to build deeply personal
ways forward, together.
Our own practice of marine science and research is not
fully inclusive: As an authorship team we collectively have only our
own subjective experience and the work presented in published
peer-reviewed papers to draw from. It was our explicit intention not to
co-opt others voices in a way that reduced their power or changed their
intent, which is difficult without deep understanding. We can only ever
present a partial and limited view and aim to open a dialogue to include
others in an on-going process of learning and reflecting (Winkler and
Williams, 2017). Inclusion of different voices in different ways is not
intended to make those voices ‘other’ or separate, but the publication
process which leads to scientific research papers is restrictive and
needs to become more inclusive, especially to those at earlier career
stages and diverse backgrounds (Bennett, 2018). While the authorship
group for this paper does encompass a more diverse group than often
encountered, we recognise that more diversity is better, and we
recognise the vast number of voices not included in the research
undertaken.
More broadly, despite attempts to be diverse and to actively include
other voices, marine science production is still the domain of a narrow
set of hegemonic interests
(white/Western/middle-aged/middle-class/male/positivist scientific)
(Bennett, 2018). There remains significant work for science and
knowledge production to be sufficiently co-produced, inclusive and
diverse (Nielsen et al., 2018, Walter and Suina, 2019), and we support
the multiple efforts across marine science to address these issues.
These include: specific science organisation and Indigenous and
Traditional Peoples partnerships, such as the Kimberley Indigenous
Saltwater Science Project in Western Australia (Western Australian
Marine Science Institution, 2014); structural corrections in science
organisations to address barriers to women’s participation in marine
science (Sardelis et al., 2017); and formal embedding of local
ecological knowledge of small-scale fishers in marine assessments in
developing contexts (Berkström et al., 2019). These efforts examine
equity as it manifests in futures ocean science. They show that while
who gets what (e.g. distributive equity as per the SDGs) is a
traditional way of looking at justice, process and procedural equity are
equally important. It is also clear that each justice question will be
framed differently depending on environmental, economic, and social
contexts. Therefore, the basis for decision making must be underpinned
by a clearly expressed conceptual framework that is acceptable to all
parties and there must be openness to consider transformational change.