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).