Material expertise: An ontological approach to stakeholder participation in marine policy

Abstract

This paper utilizes the work of Bruno Latour to develop an ontology for the development of non-credentialed expertise. In the field of marine policy studies there is a wide body of scholarship advocating the importance of including stakeholder knowledge in the formation of public fishery policies. Despite the many calls for increased stakeholder involvement in fisheries and marine policy development, there remains a relative lack of scholarship that explores how the stakeholder expertise develops and how its quality might be assessed in policy settings. Employing Latour's concepts of material mediation, translation, and inscription to describe the connections between materiality, experience, and expertise this paper offers an ontological explanation of what constitutes non-credentialed expertise. By analyzing the Snook and Gamefish Foundation's deployment of non-credentialed stakeholder expertise in two Florida fisheries management debates from an ontological perspective this paper suggests a materially oriented heuristic for identifying and evaluating stakeholder expertise in marine policy settings.