'Inter- and transdisciplinary approaches for sustainable marine futures'
The Centre for Marine Socioecology is excited to announce our Interdisciplinary Spring School 2023 – which will run from October 15th-20th in Hobart, Tasmania.
Course Description
This short course, run by the Centre for Marine Socioecology, introduces graduate students and early career researchers to interdisciplinary research skills in the context of achieving sustainable marine social-ecological futures. Throughout the week you will learn about both theory and practice relating to inter- and transdisciplinary marine research in different contexts. You will consider a range of related applied topics include co-design and engaging with stakeholders including Indigenous communities. We will use the lens of sustainable marine futures to help you develop core professional competencies for becoming an interdisciplinary researcher. These skills could be applied in almost any research context, and so the course could be of interest to those working in research areas unconnected to sustainability. The course will be delivered via a series of lectures, skill development sessions, group project work, and stakeholder engagement. The central activity of the course will be developing a collaborative interdisciplinary project proposal in response to a real-world problem identified by representatives from various marine stakeholder groups including the state government, industry, and NGOs.
Context
Climate change is happening at an unprecedented rate, with local to global effects on natural systems. These impacts include melting ice, rising seas and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, driving floods, coastal erosion, heat waves and droughts.
Society must consider how it can adapt and thrive under these changes by co-creating shared visions of a sustainable future and then taking practical action to manage (and share) risks effectively, build societal and economic resilience, and recognise and act on opportunities that may arise.
Addressing social-ecological issues in the marine realm today and for future generations requires an interdisciplinary approach that brings together ecological, social, and economic perspectives amongst others.
Learning Outcomes
On successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:
Content
Guest Presenter and Facilitator
Course Presenters (to be finalised)
Cost
Free for UTAS postgraduate students. $500 AUD for external students and ECRs. Subsidised accommodation is also available if required for $500 for the week.
Funding
Scholarships for travel and accommodation may be available for Australian Indigenous postgraduate students. Please send enquiry email to the contact below by CoB September 25th if interested.
Applications
All students and ECRs with an interest in developing interdisciplinary knowledge and skills are welcome to apply for the Spring School, no experience necessary. Places are limited, but we still have room left.
If you wish to participate, please complete the EOI form here by 25th September 2023: https://forms.gle/4tZb8qozYzXUWFUBA
For further information, please contact cms.admin@utas.edu.au
Project summary: This project will examine key similarities and differences between climate-driven species shifts and species introductions from the perspective of both individual species and recipient communities, with the aim of uncovering opportunities for reciprocal learning between these two fields. By comparing concepts, hypotheses and theories of both invasive ecology and climate-driven range shifts, we may provide recommendations for how to combine theories to improve research links and strengthen the conceptual pillars of both fields.
Supervisors: Gretta Pecl , Valeriya Komyakova, Cascade Sorte and Morgan Tingley
This short course, run by the Centre for Marine Socioecology, introduces graduate students and early career researchers to interdisciplinary research skills in the context of applied climate change adaptation and social equity in marine social-ecological systems. Throughout the week you will learn about both theory and practice relating to adaptation at a variety of scales and in different contexts. You will consider a range of related issues such as equity, trade-offs and conflict. We will use the lens of climate change adaptation to help you develop core professional competencies for becoming an interdisciplinary researcher. These skills could be applied in almost any research context, and so the course could be of interest to those working in research areas unconnected to adaptation or marine systems per se. The course will be delivered via a series of lectures, skill development sessions, group project work and a field trip. The central activity of the course will be developing a collaborative interdisciplinary project proposal in response to a real-world problem identified by representatives from various marine stakeholder groups including the state government, industry and NGO’s.
On successful completion of this course, participants will be able to:
Free for UTAS postgraduate students. $500 AUD for external students and ECR’s. Subsidised accommodation is also available if required for $500 for the week.
Scholarships for travel and accommodation may be available for Australian Indigenous postgraduate students. Please send enquiry email to the contact below by November 31st 2019 if interested.
Dr Madeline Green, Executive Support & Research Development Officer, Centre for Marine Socioecology
It will translate the principles and features of socio-ecological resilience to the features of legal systems, and develop specific criteria with which to evaluate how current frameworks for fisheries management and fisheries promote resilience.
This project will be the first major study to identify the aspects of resilience thinking of relevance to Australian environmental law, and to evaluate the current performance and potential of various environmental domains against resilience criteria.
The overarching objective of this project is to enhance Australian coastal and fisheries governance by embedding socio-ecological resilience into regulatory and regime design. This objective will be achieved through four specific project aims:
1. Formulating criteria for assessing the extent to which legal and governance arrangements promote socio-ecological system (SES) resilience;
2. Evaluating how well fisheries and coastal management regimes currently promote resilience and have potential to do so in the future;
3. Assessing drivers of, limitations and barriers to, greater adoption of resilience-based approaches in marine governance; and
4. Devising specific recommendations for improving the domains studied and general tools and recommendations on how Australian marine governance frameworks can better promote resilience.
Translating resilience thinking into legal management regimes requires in-depth assessment of specific domains of environmental governance and testing of resilience principles in those specific contexts. The project uses fisheries and coastal management as key focal domains. A specific case study will be selected for each domain, to give clear focus and definition to the analysis, for example a specific fishery and a specific coastal community.
As a result, there is an urgent need for sustainable ocean management. Whilst marine conservation initiatives have increased over recent years, ocean management is slow to involve communities in its development. We use the term ‘social license to operate’ broadly in the terrestrial literature, but its understanding and use within the marine realm has been limited.
The aim of this project is to understand how social license can bridge communication gaps, and barriers, between the users of the ocean environment. Furthermore, it asks how we can improve our understanding of social license by applying it to the marine sector. In this project we will outline the value of social license. We will also summarise the potential of social license to enable the industry-community cooperation needed to share ocean resources sustainably. Social research case studies (national and international) will enable us to discover community understandings of ocean sustainability and social license of marine systems, including recreational fisheries and marine protected areas. We will also identify how engagement, knowledge and perceptions of marine realm management might be improved.
This research will attempt to link social license theory with citizen science. It will do this to produce actual practical outcomes that may be applied in sustainable management. The project has considerable potential to produce novel, and influence future, theoretical understandings of social license and citizen science, and their application in the management and development of sustainable ocean use.
In practice, however, participation is proving complex and is not necessarily living up to the promises of the ICZM literature. In coastal governance, researchers and policy practitioners may be exacerbating the political tensions associated with participatory practice by adopting the norms of citizen participation “intuitively, vaguely or rhetorically” (Puente-Rodrigues 2014).
Coastal zone governance, in mature representative democracies at least, take place in a broader socio-political context in which existing institutions are unable to respond to citizen demands for greater power through participation. In the coastal zone literature, however, the problem is frequently case as a localised situation of undesirable conflict. This approach overlooks the significance of participation as a political act and expression of political agency for the citizen.
The tension between citizen representation through stakeholder engagement and the promise of direct citizen participation as political act to influence decision-making will be examined using the lens of political representation theory.
The objectives of this project are to:
