Ways of World Knowing

After decades of long and thorny negotiations, the United Nations agreed to a High Seas Treaty in 2023 that is designed to protect marine biodiversity in areas Beyond National Jurisdictions (BBNJ Agreement). This treaty is just one of many policy documents that have been introduced as a part of global policy efforts to protect oceans amid a climate crisis that is having devastating effects on marine life.

Despite the prevalence of ocean knowledge in coastal communities around the world, local ways of knowing have often been marginalised in scientific narratives and legal provisions. Historically, local knowledge has often either been pitted against scientific knowledge or appropriated, blended and integrated with scientific knowledge by diluting the situated nature and cultural identity of local knowledge. Both approaches perpetuate patterns of power imbalances and epistemic injustices.

Ways of World Knowing brings together philosophers of science, marine scientists, and lawyers to discuss the role and importance of local coastal community knowledge in order to better represent their voices in ocean governance. By analyzing the epistemic value of varieties of local knowledges, this volume brings vital marginalized perspectives to the forefront and overcomes the dichotomy often found in legal documents between marine scientific research and local knowledge. Here, the contributors use the term 'local knowledge' (rather than 'traditional knowledge') deliberately to refer to varieties of ways of knowing more broadly understood-spanning coastal communities from Scotland to Canada, from Brazil to New Zealand-whose distinctive features include their being non-written, artisanal and experiential in nature, and intergenerationally transmitted. Topics include the knowledge of Brazilian fishing communities and of past Hebridean kelpmakers, the cultural significance of herring spawning for Squamish Peoples in Canada, the Indigenous People's knowledge in Australia legal provisions, and arts-based research and practice in international governance spaces, among others. These cross-disciplinary essays explore the importance and nature of varieties of local knowledge for coastal communities as well as (historical and current) epistemic injustices they face. They also propose participatory approaches that effectively embed these local ways of knowing into policy and ocean governance.

By bringing a situated knowledge approach to ongoing, timely and thorny governance questions about the ocean, this volume is an innovative contribution not just for the 'blue humanities' but for environmental studies at large and for transdisciplinary approaches to philosophy of science.