Reframing marine resource management with relational ontologies and hybrid entanglements: Fishing for empathy between Azorean fishers and scientists

Abstract

Springing from research on the knowledge regimes that affect small-scale fishers and scientists who engage in fisheries governance, in the Azores Islands, Portugal, this article explores how knowledge and communication practices are related to our understandings of the ocean world. It uses diverse social sciences to reframe the marine ecological crisis and re-imagine a broad mix of world views co-existing. It discusses the limitations of the ontology and epistemology born from a hegemonic way of understanding The World, which grew out of the grand narrative of modernity and the colonial power that established Europe as the centre of World History, and condemned Nature to be merely resources whose sole purpose is to serve the dominant economic system. In contrast, Southern world views acknowledge the world's ontological multiplicity, showing us the relationality, hybridity and pluriverse of socio-ecological entanglements and imaginations. Drawing upon debates amongst contemporary critical scholars and activists from an environmental sociology and political ecology perspective, this article challenges normative Northern/Western sciences and how they influence the way researchers understand marine and maritime issues. It examines the implications of ontology on the current oceanic crisis focusing specifically in marine resource management and fisheries policy. Using a diverse source of social sciences it explores the dominant assumptions of the One-World world view and suggests a framework of empathy for diverse scientists and fishers to appreciate their commonalities to better work together across otherwise seemingly insurmountable differences in ways of knowing in order to imagine and create as of yet, unimagined, governance that will support the continual wellbeing of ocean ecosystems and coastal fishing communities.