Economic growth strategies grounded in blue economy narratives are intensifying and proliferating marine conflicts. In light of this, the study explores how local actors employ bricolage—improvised, resourceful strategies—to challenge institutional norms and reconfigure power relations in the context of marine resource conflicts. We introduce a bricolage power framework to analyze marine conflict in Norway, Brazil, and South Africa. The study shows that fishers, working with NGOs and other partners, are actively engaged in amplifying their voices, promoting accountability, and seeking more just and sustainable ways to manage conflict. These insights emphasize the importance of collective action and collaborative partnerships to change conflict relations and outcomes by challenging various institutional practices and dominant power structures. In particular, the Brazilian and South African cases demonstrate how marginalized actors, through creative bricolage practices, can adapt and reinvent regulatory processes to challenge unjust practices and foster more inclusive and adaptive governance structures. While the grassroots initiatives examined show promise, they remain fragmented and have yet to catalyze systematic institutional transformation in the cases analyzed, so we are cautious against overestimating the transformative potential of these efforts.

Transdisciplinary research has been put forward as a means to foster a radical shift in traditional scientific paradigms by promoting knowledge democracy while tackling wicked problems. This paper analyses how local social-ecological dynamics and institutional realities affect the way in which transdisciplinary research generates knowledge and develops sustainability pathways in diverse marine and coastal conflict contexts. Drawing on a cross-case analysis from a multicountry Belmont Forum project, namely OceansPact, this research analyzes key lessons on transdisciplinary practice. This analysis is informed by online surveys, semi-structured interviews with scholars and focus group discussions with non-academic stakeholders involved in the OceansPact. The paper demonstrates that transdisciplinary approaches can foster conflict transformation. Nonetheless, the results highlight that context-specific factors, including trust-building strategies and institutional cultures, significantly shape the processes of knowledge co-production and linking knowledge to transformative action. This study hence emphasize the need of flexible approaches, instead of standardized frameworks, that accommodate these diverse contexts and power dynamics, warning against reductionist approaches that oversimplify complexity. Emphasizing the political nature of transdisciplinarity, this paper calls for mechanisms that mitigate power asymmetries in transdisciplinary spaces. This paper moreover underscores the urgent need of systemic changes in academic institutions to support long-term, equitable collaboration between scholars and non-academic stakeholders, as well as of a shared understanding of transdisciplinary research so that this model can drive positive transformation.

Worldwide, marine conflicts are growing in frequency and intensity due to increasing global demands for resources (Blue Growth) and climate change. This article introduces a collection in Maritime Studies on marine conflicts and pathways to sustainability in an era of Blue Growth and climate change. We posit that while conflict can be problematic, it can also play a positive role in bringing about societal change, by highlighting unsustainable and unjust practices and be a trigger for sustainability transformation. However, left unattended, festering marine conflict can hinder just and equitable sustainability transformation. We present two distinct, yet arguably complementary, lenses through which researchers working with sustainability engage with marine conflicts. First, a social-ecological systems approach engages in conflicts by examining the interdependencies between human and ecological systems and related governance arrangements, promoting collaborative learning and action, and exploring adaptive governance strategies that seek sustainability conflict resolution. Second, a political ecology approach addresses conflicts by examining power dynamics and resource (mal)distributions, arguing for fair governance, and emphasizing the need to address historical and current injustices that are at the root of conflicts. Next, we present insights on diverse sustainability transformational pathways, including the importance of searching for common ground and the need for the reconfiguration of power relations as key steps to understand and inform sustainability conflict research. We conclude by indicating that more sustainability research in marine conflict settings is needed and by forwarding intersectionality as a promising approach to productively reframe and disrupt the debilitating effects of deep-rooted marine sustainability conflicts. 

This paper explores deep insights into sustainability transition tensions and pathways in terms of place-based conflict and potential for synergies between offshore wind energy (OWE) development and justice for humans and nonhuman nature. Specifically, we build a capability and recognition-based multispecies blue justice framework that at once centers ecological reflexivity (i.e., environmental awareness-raising, proxy representation of nature, and institutional recognition and protection of rights of nature and human-nature relationality), decenters anthropocentric frames of justice, and sheds light on injustices, human and nonhuman that climate and energy transitions may create or reinforce. This framework then informs analysis of a sustainability transition conflict, specifically a longstanding OWE conflict on Hiiumaa island, Estonia. This analysis unravels justice concerns, human and nonhuman, raised by proxy representatives of nature (i.e., grassroots actors and environmental stewards), the knowledge contestations involved, and the resolution measures undertaken thus far. Next, we discuss the possible transformative role of the OWE conflict, including how a Supreme Court ruling invalidating the OWE plan has fostered reflexive planning and may have set a legal precedent that may have human and nonhuman justice implications for the handling of future planning cases. We then highlight remaining challenges for socially and ecologically responsive OWE deployment. These include the judicial non-recognition of nature’s right as well as environmental values and sociocultural ties to nature as rights worth protecting, and the likely effects that formalization of European Union ambitions to speed-up and ramp-up renewable energy could have locally. These include prospects for environmental stewards and ocean defenders to steer nature-positive, people-centered energy transitions. Last, we propose conditions for enhanced multispecies justice, including how formal interventions (e.g., law) and informal practices (e.g., negotiation, awareness-raising) can be harnessed to unlock productive conflict and align energy transitions with the norms of justice, human and nonhuman.

Festering ocean conflict thwarts efforts to realize the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This paper explores transformations of ocean conflict into situated sustainability pathways that privilege human needs, justice and equity. We first outline the promise and limits of prevailing ocean/coastal governance practices, with a focus on marine spatial planning (MSP), which by framing conflict in shallow terms as use incompatibility, supports resolution strategies that privilege neoliberal technocratic-managerial and post-political models of consensual negotiation, thereby obscuring the structural inequalities, maldistributions and misrecognitions that drive deep-seated conflicts. Next, the distinctive features of the marine realm and ocean conflict are explained. Third, we outline the root causes, drivers and scale of conflict, with reference to history, climate, culture, governance, institutions and prevailing international socio-political conditions. Fourth, we reflect on the nature of conflict, exploring implications for shallow and deeper approaches of handling conflicts. Fifth, we highlight the implications of knowledge co-production for understanding and transforming conflict in pursuit of justice. Then, in response to the orthodoxies of MSP and prevailing conflict resolution strategies, we elaborate an alternative approach – Pragmatic Agonistic co-produced Conflict Transformation (PACT) for sustainability – sketching out key elements of a praxis that seeks to transform destructive interaction patterns of conflict into co-produced, constructive, scalable and ‘institutionalizable’ yet contestable and provisional sustainability knowledge-action.