Scientific research vessels produce vital data for marine science and fisheries management, yet the social dimensions of data production at sea remain underexplored. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and workshops, we employ practice theory to examine how scientific data are produced on research vessels. We find that research cruises contain four key complexes of practices: searching, retrieving, sorting, and datafication. We zoom in on three examples to show how the routinized practices performed on research vessels can embed certain ways of knowing the ocean into primary data about the deep ocean. In this case, discarding practices render certain organisms invisible, which has the effect of reproducing the single-species management paradigm while investigating a potential mesopelagic fishery. Zooming out shows how research vessel work connects to and reinforces existing analytical, commercial, and management practices. The selections and omissions that result from the routine nature of at-sea work fundamentally shape scientific understanding of the deep ocean, which in turn informs and determines future governance decisions. Finally, this framework and methodology demonstrate how interdisciplinary approaches can identify small realignments in scientific practices that can enhance research vessel work and adapt to rapidly changing knowledge needs.

The planned expansion of wind energy in the North Sea holds significant implications for marine biodiversity. Wind energy infrastructure can enhance biodiversity by providing hard substrates and reef-like habitats or degrade it by disturbing existing benthic habitat. However, it remains unclear what kinds of biodiversity will in practice be enhanced, in whose interest and for what purpose. To assess the effects of offshore wind energy parks on biodiversity, a range of new monitoring technologies are being developed, including monitoring technologies that incorporate environmental DNA (eDNA). However, which biodiversities eDNA sampling strategies can observe starts with their design; with different assumptions, priorities, material affordances, and ways of knowing biodiversity inscribed into material sampling technologies and their deployment. Using a framework to examine processes of inscription, this paper explores how assumptions and priorities, conditioned by the material affordances of eDNA, affect the design of a monitoring strategy assessing biodiversity enhancement. We show that the process of inscription constitutes a form of de facto governance, whereby the design of an eDNA monitoring strategy in the present shapes how biodiversity is governed in the future. We conclude that inscription is an open-ended process that allows for reflexivity on the socio-material dimensions of monitoring technologies such as eDNA, providing an opportunity to (re) imagine ways that biodiversity can be inscribed, opening up how it is conceptualised, measured and enhanced.

With growing concerns over declining shark populations, states, NGOs and regional bodies are increasingly intensifying fisheries and conservation measures to protect endangered migratory shark species along the West African coast. Together, these measures impact the transboundary fishing and trade mobilities of nomadic fishery communities, which are fundamental for their livelihoods and fishery traditions. Through the lens of social navigation and mobility regimes, we examine how the Fante fisherfolk navigate these fisheries, conservation and border regulations via strategies enabled by their patron-client relations. First, we show how these regulations together constitute an interconnected mobility regime that extends across land and sea. Second, we show how these socially-embedded patronage relations can by themselves constitute a counter-mobility regime that mitigates the effects, evades and reshapes dominant mobility regimes. These findings contribute to ongoing debates on the mobility regimes by showing how mobile fishery practices challenge attempts to fix and securitise them through increasingly securitised national and regional borders across land-sea.

As the construction of offshore wind parks expand globally, questions are being raised about their impacts on marine biodiversity. To mitigate these impacts, countries are embedding biodiversity conservation and restoration within their offshore wind tendering process. These tenders not only determine the technical design of offshore wind parks but also coordinate decisions on what kinds of biodiversity to conserve, enhance and/or restore. Using an inscription framework this paper compares how biodiversity assumptions and priorities influence the design of these tendering processes in England and the Netherlands. These cases show the different ways tendering processes constitute de facto approaches to biodiversity governance that demonstrate how institutional assumptions and priorities co-determine which future biodiversities are mitigated, enhanced or protected. By unpacking this black box of assumptions, priorities and ways of knowing, tendering processes can be made more reflexive, opening up deliberation on what kinds of biodiversity are being enacted through biodiversity assessments and tendering criteria, holding implications for future biodiversities associated with the expansion of marine infrastructure.

MotivationThe sustainability of aquaculture worldwide is increasingly shaped by international relations. The European Union (EU) and China have considerable influence on the sustainability of the industry, both domestically and globally. However, little is known about the similarities and differences between the region and country that govern aquaculture sustainability internally and how they shape the sustainability of the sector in other parts of the world, including rapidly developing aquaculture regions in Africa.PurposeWe assess the domestic governance of sustainability in aquaculture in the EU and China. We then analyse the extent to which these two areas translate their internal sustainability goals into aquaculture-related development cooperation with African countries.Approach and methodsWe undertook a scoping review of domestic policy for the sustainable development of aquaculture in the EU and China. We reviewed EU and Chinese development projects, financing, and trade policies supporting aquaculture development in Africa. The findings of these reviews were validated in a workshop.FindingsAlthough the EU and China express similar technical and environmental concerns, they differ in their governance of their domestic aquaculture sectors. Similarly, at the international level, while both the EU and China have explicitly committed to promote sustainable aquaculture overseas, their approaches to achieving these ambitions through development cooperation differ substantially. EU cooperation includes creating (ambitious) norms for sustainability in Africa. China avoids influencing the domestic policies of African countries, preferring to provide training and technical cooperation. Our comparison reveals areas of existing competition between the EU and China in the development of aquaculture internationally, but also overlooked areas of potential complementarity and cooperation.FindingsAlthough the EU and China express similar technical and environmental concerns, they differ in their governance of their domestic aquaculture sectors. Similarly, at the international level, while both the EU and China have explicitly committed to promote sustainable aquaculture overseas, their approaches to achieving these ambitions through development cooperation differ substantially. EU cooperation includes creating (ambitious) norms for sustainability in Africa. China avoids influencing the domestic policies of African countries, preferring to provide training and technical cooperation. Our comparison reveals areas of existing competition between the EU and China in the development of aquaculture internationally, but also overlooked areas of potential complementarity and cooperation.Policy implicationsOur findings contribute to an improved understanding of aquaculture governance and enable the exploration of possibilities for greater alignment between EU and Chinese interventions in aquaculture around the world.

China’s decision to exempt economically important amphibians and reptiles from the wild animal consumption ban reveals the ongoing tension between food production and biodiversity conservation. An integrated approach to governing food systems for the conservation of endangered wild animals can reconcile this tension.

The Aquaculture Governance Indicators (AGI) are an integrated social scientific framework for assessing governance performance for steering aquaculture sectors towards sustainability around the world. The AGI assess four governance dimensions against three governance principles. The four governance dimensions – legislation, voluntary codes and standards, collaborative arrangements and governance capabilities - allow for a systematic mapping of the governance landscape. The governance principles – legitimacy, effectuation, and coordination – focus on the organisation of roles and responsibilities, the implementation and effectiveness of enforcement, monitoring and learning, and the alignment of activities. This paper demonstrates the explorative and explanatory power of the AGI framework using the case of disease management in the salmon industries of Norway, Chile, and Canada. Our findings show that the governance of disease risk in these salmon industries is strongly supported by state legislation, yet remains limited in steering towards alternative solutions for avoiding or mitigating the effects of disease – and other persistent environmental challenges. We conclude that the AGI provides a valuable framework for self- or guided reflection and deliberation amongst decision-makers and stakeholders in aquaculture sectors around the world. Further development of the AGI framework will focus on a global set of country assessments, comparative analysis between production regions, comparison with other aquaculture indicator frameworks and the AGI’s potential for assessing the governance performance of food systems more broadly.

Aquaculture is undergoing a revolution of data-driven innovation. The rapid uptake of digital technologies in the sector contributes ever larger amounts of data that hold potential for improving decision making for aquatic food system sustainability. Realising the potential of digital tools and new data streams is, however, not inevitable. The current ecosystem of global and production-level digital aquaculture technologies and platforms is highly fragmented with a strong focus on private farm-level data for improving production efficiency, and limited publicly available data that can be used for social and environmental sustainability. Three scenarios for the future development of the aquaculture data ecosystem are possible (1) continued fragmentation; (2) centralisation, and (3) coordination in a federated ecosystem. Recognising a federated ecosystem as having the most potential for contributing to food system sustainability we provide three priority areas for improving data coverage, sharing and integration between and among farm-level and global platforms.

Sustainability risks in aquaculture are increasingly addressed through forms of assurance that rely on the use of digital technologies. By bringing in new actors and informational processes, these forms of digital sustainability assurance challenge existing notions of how global value chains are governed. Based on in-depth interviews with experts, we find that the growing use of digital technologies to mediate assurance is shaped by the digital codification of informational processes designed to support sustainability, which in turn increases the complexity of sustainability claims and changes the capabilities needed by value chain actors to comply. Furthermore, we find that digital sustainability assurance represents a new form of value chain coordination by a new set of extra-transactional "digital lead actors." As these lead actors become more prominent, their control over digital data flows constitutes a new form of value chain governance with the potential to have greater impact on steering toward sustainability.

Infectious diseases are a major threat to Asian shrimp aquaculture, as they proliferate at system level rather than only the individual level. We assess the impact of various forms of cooperation among Vietnamese farmers on yield risks caused by white spot disease and acute hepatopancreatic necrosis disease. Using a stochastic simulation model, we simulate shrimp farming yield risks based on input from two expert workshops. The results provide a relative comparison of expected yield losses caused by both diseases comparing a baseline scenario (no cooperation) and three scenarios with varying degrees of synchronization and information sharing across farms. Results show lower expected yield losses in all three cooperation scenarios in comparison with the farm-based scenario, highlighting the value of synchronization and information sharing practices to mitigate yield losses. We discuss the potential this has to reduce systemic risks in aquaculture, thereby potentially incentivizing the reintroduction of risk-sharing mechanisms.

Promoted by the state, and national and international companies, salmon farming has spread to the south of Chile over the last three decades. This expansion has been resisted by local groups as social and environmental impacts in expanded territories of production and processing have been identified. Informed by a counter-territorialisation and network theory lens, we analyse how strategies by the state and national and international companies to expand salmon aquaculture have been resisted by a global network led by the Indigenous nomadic Yagán people. Data was obtained through participant observation and interviews gathered during three periods of fieldwork in the Region of Magallanes. Our research shows how network-making power was employed to resist state territorialisation at sea to reconfigure spatial boundaries and power relations at the border of the Chilean state. These findings extend an understanding of marine counter-territorialisation and contribute to a reorientation of marine policies to recognise networked spatial claims and territorial rights of Indigenous people of the sea.

Wholesale markets, wholesalers, and processors play critical but underappreciated roles in shaping food systems. Most conventional research on food provisioning analyzes value chains in terms of their structure, conduct, and performance. We contend that a practices lens can illuminate how food systems are produced and reproduced through the emergence of new wholesale practices relating to quality, trust, and risk, and provide more nuanced understandings of how markets and trading shape and are shaped by food system transformations. Applying a practices lens to the analysis of these changes can help identify new ways of steering food systems toward more sustainable outcomes.

Abstract This chapter details the unprecedented progress toward elimination of transmission or elimination as a public health problem of three neglected tropical diseases—onchocerciasis, lymphatic filariasis, and trachoma. The strategies used and the history of their development are documented, and endemic areas and regions are identified. A major component of the elimination strategy for the three diseases is annual preventive chemotherapy of donated drugs by mass drug administration, usually through a network of community-directed distributors. This is accompanied by morbidity management. The parameters for confirmation of progress and elimination, through standardized evaluation, are documented, as well as available diagnostic technologies. The chapter also looks at the economic aspects of the programs, focusing on the cost effectiveness of the interventions and the projected social and economic gains of elimination. It discusses neglected tropical disease programs in the context of the broader development agenda, as these interventions focus on the alleviation and prevention of disability and the treatment of the most vulnerable and difficult-to-access populations. Challenges to reach elimination are also discussed—including epidemiological challenges, the need to integrate programs into wider health systems, and the need for further national and cross-border coordination. Despite these challenges, the chapter makes a strong case that with the guidelines, partnerships, and structures in place today the ambitious elimination goals set out by the World Health Organization are in reach.

Background Access to affordable, quality healthcare is the key element of universal health coverage (UHC). This study examines the effectiveness of the neglected tropical disease (NTD) mass drug administration (MDA) campaign approach as a means to deliver UHC, using the example of the Liberia national programme. Methods We first mapped the location of 3195 communities from the 2019 national MDA treatment data reporting record of Liberia. The association between coverage for onchocerciasis and lymphatic filariasis treatment achieved in these communities was then explored using a binomial geo-additive model. This model employed three key determinants for community 'remoteness': population density and the modelled travel time of communities to their supporting health facility and to their nearest major settlement. Results Maps produced highlight a small number of clusters of low treatment coverage in Liberia. Statistical analysis suggests there is a complex relationship between treatment coverage and geographic location. Conclusions We accept the MDA campaign approach is a valid mechanism to reach geographically marginal communities and, as such, has the potential to deliver UHC. We recognise there are specific limitations requiring further study.

The need for urgent, structural transformations to dominant food systems is increasingly recognized in research and policy. The direction these transformations take is in great part influenced by how the problem is framed and what future pathways become seen as plausible and desirable. Scientific knowledge and the organizations producing it hold considerable authority in suggesting what alternatives are or are not worth pursuing, ultimately shaping frames and in turn being shaped by them. This paper examines Brazil’s federal Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), a major contributor to technological advances that made Brazil into an agricultural powerhouse. We examine the ways in which Embrapa’s leadership has framed sustainable agriculture in its public communication and the wider implications for food systems transformation. Drawing from Embrapa news articles in the period 2015–2020, we identify four interrelated frames forming Embrapa’s prevalent position on sustainability. Our results show that while Embrapa promotes practices based on alternative approaches such as agroecology, its deeper framing often reflects the core assumptions driving dominant industrial food systems. This framing reinforces underlying logics of control, efficiency, and competition aligned with the productivist paradigm and excludes divergent perspectives that exist within the organization.

A greater focus on governance is needed to facilitate effective and substantive progress toward sustainability transformations in the aquaculture sector. Concerted governance efforts can help move the sector beyond fragmented technical questions associated with intensification and expansion, social and environmental impacts, and toward system-based approaches that address interconnected sustainability issues. Through a review and expert-elicitation process, we identify five engagement arenas to advance a governance agenda for aquaculture sustainability transformation: (1) setting sustainability transformation goals, (2) cross-sectoral linkages, (3) land-water-sea connectivity, (4) knowledge and innovation, and (5) value chains. We then outline the roles different actors and modes of governance can play in fostering sustainability transformations, and discuss action items for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to operationalize activities within their engagement arenas.

This paper explores the performance and embeddedness of information practices performed by smallholder farmers in Vietnamese shrimp aquaculture in response to private sustainability interventions. Using a social practice intervention framework, we analyse how existing information practices embedded in the wider social lives of farmers are affected by the adoption of both analogue and digital reporting methodologies prescribed by the Aquaculture Stewardship Council and VerifiK8. Our results demonstrate how these reporting methodologies are not aligned to the performance and embeddedness of existing information practices, and how this misalignment has undermined their function and performance. The paper concludes that understanding information practices offers important insights for redesigning these reporting interventions and, in doing so, better support both the goals of farmers and the improvement of shrimp sustainability. These observations hold implications for improving the impact of informational interventions for not only shrimp production but smallholder production in a range of food sectors.