Future Lives with Oceans and Waters

Future Lives with Oceans and Waters (FLOW) will enable co-ownership, co-responsibility and co-implementation of the young generation to co-create effective, target-group oriented and actionable blueprints for stewardship assemblages featuring social interaction and engagement with sea and waters. In doing so, FLOW will contribute to the Restore our Oceans by 2030 Mission. The project's innovative design brings together diverse young people from all across Europe with an excellent, interdisciplinary research team. Our research is built along a chain of direct cooperation with young people via 1) the FLOW Youth advisory board, 2) the European network of youth-focused NGOs, 3) Experiential futures workshops with young people from seven regions across Europe and 4) Youth-stakeholder co-creation. FLOW will go beyond instrumental treatment of knowledge about the young generation 1) by a novel transdisciplinary research approach (‘inFLOW lens’) studying their expectations, engagements, and human-nature relationship with the seas and waters; 2) by bringing together policy-makers, researchers and other relevant stakeholders together with the youth and engaging them in co-creation of stewardship assemblages. Insights from FLOW will support shaping future policies. All stakeholders claim to represent the interests of young and future generations. FLOW develops a new approach of co-creating future policies that mitigates the risk of naively generalizing and amplifying statements of young people that are made amid, and despite of, vested interests and debates that are polarized between nature-connectedness, preservation and conservation on the one side and resource use, value creation and economic prosperity on the other side. To fully raise the potential that is embedded in FLOW's structure and generate scientifically-sound, un-biased and non-partisan insights, we base cooperation and co-creation with young people on scientific rigour, reflexivity and evidence assured.