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The paper argues that Cultural Heritage Impact Assessments (CHIAs), offer a critical space for exposing and contextualising polarised knowledge systems in ocean development. the study advocates for an ocean and energy governance that moves towards recognition, dialogue, and co-existence.

Paper long abstract

Africa’s proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) developments exemplify deepening polarisation between economic growth imperatives, climate commitments, and the constitutional rights of coastal communities to culture, environment, and heritage. This paper situates ethnographic research within the framework of Cultural Heritage Impact Assessments (CHIAs), examining their role in making visible, legible, and contestable diverse forms of ocean-related knowledge within energy decision-making processes.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2022 along the Northern, Western, and Eastern Cape coastlines, the study documents varied human–ocean relations, including fishing, foraging, ritual practice, and leisure. These engagements reveal the ocean as a living cultural landscape central to identity, social cohesion, and intergenerational ecological knowledge. When assessed through CHIAs, such practices expose epistemic dissonance between LNG development logics that are rooted in technocratic, extractive, and economic rationalities; and Indigenous and local knowledge systems grounded in relational, ethical, and place-based understandings of the sea.

The paper argues that CHIAs offer a critical space for exposing and contextualising these polarised knowledge systems, while also holding potential to bridge them by reframing energy transitions as socio-cultural, not merely technical, transformations. By foregrounding cultural relations to the ocean within governance processes, the study advocates for decolonised, inclusive approaches to ocean and energy governance that move beyond mitigation towards recognition, dialogue, and co-existence. In a polarised world of competing interests, anthropology (working through CHIAs) can play a vital role in resolving epistemic conflict and imagining socially and ecologically just futures for contested ocean spaces.

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The paper conceptualises ‘sea blindness’ as an artefact of colonial influence in marine spaces materialised through contemporary regimes of extraction, governance and labour. It situates this analysis in the intensifying opposition to the aquarium fishery on the east side of Hawaii's Big Island.

Paper long abstract

This paper conceptualises ‘sea blindness’ as an artefact of colonial influence in Hawaii, now materialized in fragmented ocean governance regimes that continue to subvert Kanaka ‘Oiwi ways of knowing and living with the sea, to extractivist imperatives. I focus on the aquarium fishery on the east side of Hawaii’s Big Island; a high value inshore fishery supplying saltwater reef fish to aquaria hobbyists worldwide. Placed under a moratorium in 2017, the fishery faces intensifying opposition as the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources (DNLR) deliberates issuing seven new commercial licenses. The paper considers how ‘high-stake fields of sea knowledges’ produced through the moratorium era have revealed the fishery, creating uneasy alliances as well as anti-extractivist solidarities. The global supply trade in marine aquarium species, an industry whose estimated retail value is US2.15 billion, however, remains largely opaque.

Then, turning to the materiality of aquaria, I consider how the removal of organisms from natural habits for human spectatorship, is realigned with a particular epistemological and ideological taming (Hawyard 2012) to mobilise blue stewardship and ocean citizenship potentials. Sustainability and conservation, in this synopsis, render oceans visible while disavowing the injuries sustained through ongoing practices of marine extractivism.

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Using a hauntological approach to sediment disposal in Marseille, this paper captures the “feral” effects of marine infrastructure. Against sea-blindness, it takes seriously the role of the ocean–its depths, movement, geochemical composition–as obscuring and revealing the costs of capitalism.

Paper long abstract

For decades, strongly polluted port sediment dredged from the Bay of Marseille to accommodate shipping was stored on a dock of the Mirabeau Basin in downtown Marseille. The disposal site was decommissioned two years ago in the wake of sustainable re-development of the area. Trying to redefine the city’s relation with the ocean, urban renewal (Euromediterranée) and 'blue economy' programs (Port of Marseille-Fos) currently convert former docks and other port infrastructure of France’s first seaport into offices, condos, and data centers. Today, dredged matter is often released in the Gulf of Fos, presumably at a safe distance from users of these new urban spaces. Charting efforts to monitor and contain toxic sediments, this paper reflects on how contaminants come to haunt contemporary relations with the ocean via the volatility of “legacy sediments” (Vauclin et al. 2020). Legacy sediments are testimony to human environmental alterations–they indicate the previous character of ocean use and shape present and future trajectories of shore development. Conveying heavy metals or PCBs, port sediments are material or non-human “witnesses” (Schuppli 2020; Richardson 2024) of overlapping histories of ocean use and practices of geoengineering. A hauntological approach to dredging activities in Marseille will allow to capture the “feral” effects of marine infrastructure (Tsing et al. 2024), arguing to take seriously the role of the ocean–its depth and geochemical composition–in obscuring and revealing the ecological costs of capitalism. How can we enroll non-human witnesses against sea-blindness to better register environmental and social harm?

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The paper examines seabed mining as a contentious frontier by outlining forms of knowledge production in the Pacific Ocean. It traces how scientific and tacit ocean knowledges generate forms of sea-sight and sea-blindness, rendering the seabed a site of speculative political contestation.

Paper long abstract

Seabed mining is emerging as a new frontier of resource extraction, framed by extractive industries as a necessary displacement-less source of critical minerals, even as NGOs and UN country delegations call for moratoriums and warn that its knowledge base remains deeply uncertain. This paper explores how forms of sea-blindness and sea-sight are actively generated and contested in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico as this yet-to-be speculative frontier takes shape.

Moving beyond “just” scientific forms of knowledge production on seabed mining that have been the subject of recent scholarship, this paper ethnographically follows the contentious encounters between the fast-paced multilateral knowledge production of the International Seabed Authority and an artisanal fishing cooperative that successfully fought off a prospected seabed mine off the coast of Baja California. Through this ethnographic movement across scales and sites, specific ways of knowing the Pacific Ocean and its extractive potential emerge in a political struggle that contrasts the speed and techno-materiality of scientific knowledge production with the tacit, lived experience of ocean ecologies. By teasing out the tacit, more-than-human, and scientific knowledge production of two mining patches—one cancelled within the Mexican exclusive economic zone and one planned 500 km beyond it—I outline this resource frontier and blur its boundaries. The ethnography thus shows how this contentious frontier emerges through speculative forms of knowing that blur the lines between veracity and disinformation, sea-sight and sea-blindness.

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This contribution questions the premises and promises of locating the ethnographic gaze in specific locations to conduct fieldwork on seafarers and argues that sea-blindness should be understood in relation with the surveillance of seafarers.

Paper long abstract

While sea-blindness does not have a proper entry in the Oxford English Dictionary, it is a pervasive expression that I often came across in my research on seafarers’ labour rights in international commercial shipping. For shipowners, social workers, labour inspectors or trade unionists I job-shadowed and interacted with in northern German ports, “sea-blindness” is one of these rare issues that brings about a consensus: they all agree that people on land are “sea-blind” towards the critical role of seafarers, while at the same time highly depending on their labour for the maintenance of supply chains and critical delivery of commodities. Additionally, sea-blindness is a concept that is also widely used by critical scholars of logistics in order to shed light on the entrapment of seafarers: they convincingly argue that shipping thrives on hiding their unsightly exploitation. The puzzle that I explore in this paper is the common narrative that actors from the shipping industry, and academic debates about them share concerning sea-blindness: by invoking this notion, they do not only assume it is possible to reverse it, or to mitigate its effects. Much more, overcoming sea-blindness is an urgent impact they all want to achieve. In order to enquire why and how these different positions may align, my paper is a critical reflection on the notion of sea-blindness. My goal is to tease out the epistemological tensions existing between seeing and knowing at the core of the anthropological scientific endeavour.

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This paper shows how Seychelles’ debt-for-nature swap tied debt relief to “transparent” ocean metrics (audit-ready data and monitoring protocols) that misread artisanal fishers’ seasonal, species-specific knowledge, narrowing participation and shifting authority amid conservation and climate risks.

Paper long abstract

“How can you monitor our fishery when your inspector shows up at nine, when nobody lands fish—you incorporate that as falling fish stocks into the next round of regulations.” Paraphrasing an artisanal fisherman on Mahé, what sounds like a story of mistimed data collection reveals deeper stakes in politically consequential data and opens onto the polarized politics of ocean knowledge. Drawing on ethnographic research with artisanal fishers and regulatory actors, this paper examines how the world’s first marine debt-for-nature swap in Seychelles—hailed as a breakthrough in ocean finance—intensified struggles over what counts as credible ocean knowledge.

As the necessity of debt restructuring became tied to extensive maritime visualization and “transparent” conservation outcomes, the state and its partners had to generate new forms of legibility: standardized catch statistics, monitoring protocols, and a Marine Spatial Plan, designating 30% of national waters for protection. Yet these audit-ready metrics and “investable projects at scale” produce friction with fishers’ embodied, seasonal, and species-specific knowledge of currents, seasonality, targeting practices, and landing rhythms. As these new modes of narrative control unfold, leaving little room for participation without “proper” methods, fishers’ accounts are often dismissed as unreliable, and consultations risk operating as fait accompli arenas: participation is invited, but only on terms that favor external scientific protocols and finance-facing accountability. The effect is a polarized politics of ocean knowledge in which transparency becomes a performance that secures legitimacy and funding within audit regimes, while redistributing authority away from those most exposed to conservation impacts and climate volatility.