Hub becomes implementing partner of the UN Ocean Decade
We are delighted to announce that in October 2023 the One Ocean Hub has been endorsed as the UN Ocean Implementing Partner. Under this mandate, the Hub will offer a comprehensive methodology for profound understanding of the ocean, upholding inclusive, respectful, and fair ocean research practices across Global North and South through our program entitled “Transdisciplinary Toolbox of Ocean Knowledge Co-Production for Transformative Governance.” The announcement was preceded by another major achievement for the Hub – the publication on Nature Sustainability of some of our key learnings on transformative ocean research and its role in fostering transformative ocean governance.
The Hub’s programme under the UN Decade Ocean
The Hub’s programme aims to bring together diverse disciplines, knowledge systems and knowledge holders to collaboratively advance the inclusive, sustainable and just ocean governance. It is an encompassing, multi-tiered program containing a number of ‘toolkits’- specific outputs and guidelines developed for an array of research and collaboration activities- including knowledge co-production, arts-lead approaches to sustainable governance to other specific transdiciplinary research initiatives. The Toolbox takes a comprehensive and innovative approach to transdisciplinary knowledge, methodologies, and research findings. It builds on the Hub’s expertise in integrated approaches to the implementation of human rights, international environmental law and the law of the sea, on the basis of aligned evidence from the marine and social sciences and the arts. It draws from the comprehensive and still evolving array of innovative research methodologies, activities and findings co-developed by the Hub and discussed with various partners (including local and international NGOs and various bodies of the UN System).
If you are interested to hear more about this, please contact Philile (philile.mbatha@uct.ac.za) and Milica (milica.prokic@strath.ac.uk)
Nature Sustainability publication
The Hub’s Nature Sustainability article “Principles for transformative ocean governance” strategically and critically connects transformative ocean research to transformative ocean governance with a view to responding to the call for “transformative science” under the UN Decade for Ocean Science. The principles emphasise biodiversity, human rights, socio-ecological systems approaches, inclusivity, and work across scales including at the United Nations level. They are proposed as a comprehensive set to help identify and learn from hidden tensions in ocean research and governance, with a view to developing and nurturing partnerships for innovative ocean action (as the Hub also shared at the 2022 UN Ocean Conference). In other words, the principles can first be used to identify blind spots in research collaborations, and then to navigate arising tensions, while keeping together diverse groups (diverse researchers, diverse human rights-holders and other stakeholders) as they better understand different positions of power underlying these tensions and reveal new and exciting areas for research and collaboration, as part of an iterative learning process.
The authors of the paper comprise 21 researchers (including experts external to the One Ocean Hub) from five continents, collaborating across ecological, social and legal disciplines. The paper seeks to respond to the many calls to reform current ocean-use practices which are based on economic growth models that have perpetuated inequities and fuelled conflict and environmental decline’.
Main photo: Nessim Stevensson
Related SDGs:
