OCEAN Sustainability Pathways for Achieving Conflict Transformation - OCEANS PACT

OCEANS PACT addresses marine conflicts in the light of the visions of blue growth, the UN's sustainability goals and the commitments to create a net zero emission society. The starting point is the increasing industrialization of the world's coastal and ocean areas and the many forms of conflict that are now emerging. OCEANS PACT includes cases from the Baltics, Brazil, India, Norway, South Africa and the USA, and we study and compare conflict types, conflict causes and conflict processes in various institutional and societal contexts. A main question is how conflicts can be transformed and contribute to more sustainable solutions. In the Norwegian part of the project, we have a special focus on the Barents Sea and the industries of oil and gas, offshore farming and offshore wind. We have organized special sessions at the MARE conference in 2021 and at the Ocean Sciences Meeting and Arctic Frontiers in 2022. Meetings have been held in the dialogue forums, and we have participated in the project’s annual meetings in Brazil (2022) and South-Africa (2023). We have developed a special issue in the journal Maritime Studies on marine conflicts. We have had a Norwegian master's student associated with the project who has written about the dispute surrounding the extraction of seabed minerals. We have also had a French student on internship who has worked on a scoping review regarding natural resource-based conflicts in literature published by various UN bodies. In 2023, the Norwegian team contributed to a MOOC on marine conflict transformation. We are working on a series of articles, of which the first has been published in Maritime Studies. This article analyzed conflicts around the opening processes for offshore wind and offshore aquaculture in Norway and provides some key lessons: • Blue economy conflicts are not easily categorized through common conflict typologies but increasingly appear to be sustainability conflicts in which all actors use sustainability as a frame of reference. • Conflicts are not necessarily negative social processes. In fact, conflicts often uncover unsustainable practices and create potential positive pathways for sustainable transformations. • How sustainability conflicts unfold is highly dependent on the institutional contexts in which they play out. In Norway, conflicts play out peacefully, with low levels of tension and in deliberative ways following established rules of the game. • There is large potential for stronger integration across the various sector agencies. Planning for these industries has happened largely in parallel processes, without strong connections to the established integrated, ecosystem-based management plans. • Earlier and more direct forms of engagement between government, industry representatives, and affected stakeholders could contribute to avoiding conflict and finding solutions in a more legitimate and timely way. We are finishing writing two other articles on 1) marine conflicts and sustainability (a conceptual article) and 2) on the institutionalization of conflict resolution around oil and gas activity. A third article is under consideration at Maritime Studies (the introduction to the above-mentioned issue). In addition, we are contributing to overarching comparative papers led by other international partners in the project. Finally, we will write a popular science presentation of the work in OCEANS PACT.

Life on earth depends on healthy oceans, but our oceans are in decline. There is mounting pressure on finite marine resources because of the increasing number of competing activities, technological advances, and over-exploitation, pollution and climate change. Conflicts about how to harness benefits from marine resources are widespread, intensifying and unfolding in unprecedented ways, including both long-standing disputes between activities and new emerging conflicts. Ocean conflicts reflect deep-rooted struggles over ownership, rights, benefits, and human-nature relationships on our Blue Planet. Surprisingly, ocean conflict resolution is an under-developed field of scholarship and practice. OCEANS PACT argues that ocean sustainability prospects depend on building tailor-made capabilities to analyze, productively manage, and where possible transform ocean conflicts. We construct a co-designed, transdisciplinary, action research approach. We aim to develop deep insights about diverse ocean conflicts through real-world collaboration of context-specific research teams that include stakeholder partners, social and natural scientists, and conflict resolution experts. Our comparative analysis focuses on conflicts that traverse the Global North and South, in South Africa, India, Brazil, Norway/Barents Sea, Baltic Sea and United States. We investigate how existing conflict resolution practices help or hinder ocean sustainability. We examine how formal interventions, e.g., law, and informal practices, e.g., negotiation, can be harnessed to unlock the transformative potential of conflict resolution. The new knowledge gained will be used to develop and test ocean conflict resolution tools and practices. OCEANS PACT will generate significant scientific, socio-political and practice benefits in our case studies, and enable scaling up of insights, tools and conflict resolution practices that foster global ocean sustainability.