Science, scale and the frontier of governing mobile marine species

Abstract

Marine turtles have complex life histories and make expansive migrations over their long lifetimes, often through multiple states’ exclusive economic zones and areas beyond national jurisdiction. This complexity makes it difficult to “know” marine turtles and presents jurisdictional mismatches for existing state and inter‐state bodies that govern turtles. This paper examines how scientists tasked with assessing marine turtles for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species have used their scientific expertise to make marine turtles legible for governance, including by rescaling the Red List assessment process to include both global and regional levels. We find that in this rescaling project, marine turtle scientists have created two new objects of governance: spatially bounded “regional management units” and the scientists themselves, who have begun to sort themselves and their work around the new spatial units in the interest of generating progress in ocean conservation. More broadly, the story of the IUCN Red List process for sea turtles turns attention to the work of science and scientists in making oceans resources legible, and therefore governable, even when they defy the boundaries of state‐led regulatory bodies or jurisdictional spaces.

Maritime borders: A reconsideration of state power and territorialities over the ocean

“…Political ecologists are used to studying conservation areas with reference to their spatial definitions with considerations regarding the physical characteristics of ecology (Zimmerer and Bassett, 2003; Miller, 2020). However, as such spatial definitions have been largely derived from land-based concepts, academics have been warned of the relatively scant attention paid to oceanic ecosystems in discussions of environmental conservation, such as the mobility of marine species (Havice et al, 2018). Regarding marine animals, Campbell (2007: 314) argues that, “migratory species and efforts to conserve them are equally ripe for treatment by geographers because these species defy spatial boundaries and move across social and political scales.” Recent scholarship regarding marine conservation and state territoriality has also urged scholars to pay more attention to how the “materiality of the sea and the conservation-security nexus results in the creation of a violent maritime space” (Muralidharan and Rai, 2020: 8).…”