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Paper short abstract:

Starting from a small-scale fishing community, we will be able to reflect on the economic and political contradictions of ocean sustainability, and the importance of different narratives as well as scale in this discussion.

Paper long abstract:

In the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, the issue of sustainability of the seas and oceans has been increasingly discussed within the scope of other environmental concerns linked to adaptation to climate change and energy transition. In these speeches, several paradoxes question the sustainability they intend to achieve.

Several actors with different agendas push for a different kind of ocean sustainability: some lobbying for economic activities as resource extraction and aquaculture, or, in the case of activists, ocean conservation achieved by minimal human interactions. This paper intends to analyze these contradictions within sustainability discourses, but mostly to reflect on the role of Humans in the sustainability of oceans, starting from an ethnography within a small-scale fishing community in Portugal, which seems to be doomed to disappear, while its daily life still retains narratives of essential traditional knowledge for a sustainable balance of the ecosystem.

Through ethnography, it is possible to know how this community relates to the environment and how it adapts to challenges exacerbated by climate change and socioeconomic tensions. In this discussion of ocean sustainability, the scale seems to be a key element since narratives of economic growth are still a great driver in the broader political agendas, with local consequences. Considering these issues, and narratives of local fishermen, we can deconstruct what local sustainability is, and possible paths to achieve it.