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Paper short abstract

Focusing on the SEAtwins project through the lens of (in)visibilisation, this paper traces the tensions within socio-ecological modelling to explore how the EU’s Digital Twin Ocean constructs a virtual marine space.

Paper long abstract

The European Union’s ‘Green Deal’ and ‘Blue Economy’ aspirations frame the ocean as a site of ‘hidden potential’ requiring legibility for effective management. Consequently, the EU is advancing its Digital Twin Ocean (DTO) initiative—aligned with its ‘Restore our Ocean and Waters’ mission—as a multilateral negotiation tool for achieving a governable ocean. Its infrastructure relies on ‘FAIR Guiding Principles,’ which function not only as technical standards but as a normative framework for the production of a virtual marine space.

By focusing on the ‘SEAtwins’ project cluster, the paper investigates the EU DTO’s implementation of socio-ecological models (SEMs) and how data and modelling practices are reconfigured across the differing expertise constellations of the SEAtwins projects in conjunction with top-down visions for ocean governance. The paper explores the ways in which researchers navigate sites of ‘sticky’ complexity in constructing the socio-ecological dimension, turning a disordered ocean into one that is digitally encapsulated, and how these manifest in their data practices amidst inseparable tensions posed by computable, ‘FAIR’, and prediction-enabling visions.

In mapping the work of the SEAtwins project cluster within the EU, this paper analyses how tensions between different actors shape the modelling practices of the SEAtwins projects through the lens of (in)visibilising as a form of epistemic injustice. In doing so, the paper attends to how the EU DTO’s digital infrastructuring practices seek to shatter the boundaries of the ocean frontier.