ZMT - Leibniz Zentrum für Marine Tropenforschung

The oceans and especially coasts face increasingly complex challenges, impacting and complicating the delicate entanglements of peoples and their marine environments. Tackling these challenges requires addressing social and environmental aspects, bringing together different ways of understanding the ocean. For this reason, under the banner of sustainable development, funding schemes are increasingly unifying research and development, calling for transdisciplinarity (including academic and non-academic specialists and policymakers) and requiring close and early-on involvement of local stakeholders in the design of proposals and the implementation of projects.

This workshop is launching a survey*https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MGYTR2Y aimed at practicing and former researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds that work on coastal and marine issues in and around the tropics. With the survey, we invite you to reflect and build on your research practices and experiences in the field. For example, how have you engaged with local actors, stakeholders, decision-makers or other researchers/disciplines in your work? How has your research been in conversation with local knowledge? Have potential insights been lost in translation? Are there instances in which your research met unexpected resistance? 

We invite you to think of better ways to acknowledge local insights, simultaneously substantiating how your research has incorporated local concerns. To build on those earlier conversations and develop a co-production of knowledge in the future. We are also interested in how administrative and funding structures foster or hamper engagements with local and seaborne knowledge.

*Joint effort by the Development and Knowledge Sociology WG (Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research) and the WG “Anticipating and Transforming Coastal Futures” of the German Committee Future Earth.