Power, knowledge and the transformative potential of marine community science

Highlights

• Community science can transform the challenges facing marine governance.

• To do so, community science must become politicised and power-aware.

• Power-aware community science facilitates pluralism and critical self-reflection.

• Initiatives can create new ways of knowing and support more active participation.

Abstract

Community science has gained momentum as a participatory knowledge production approach that can transform governance into more transparent, socially relevant, and democratic endeavours. In the marine context, where the rationalisation of economic knowledge and the marginalisation of local communities are growing concerns, community science is advanced as a potential solution to environmental governance challenges. By increasing monitoring efforts and empowering members of the public to take political action to protect the oceans, community science has helped to transform marine management to address issues, such as, sea-level rise, overfishing, and ocean acidification. However, many community science projects do not realise their transformative potential and, instead, contribute toward reinforcing the status quo of governance, meaning that management challenges remain unsolved. To understand how the full potential of community science can be achieved, research must reframe what transformation is and assess why projects often fail to instigate change. Within community science research, there is an under-appreciation of how transformational change must involve actions that challenge prevailing power relations. We seek to address this gap by initiating a discussion on the political and power dimensions of community science. Drawing on the broader field of co-production, we argue that community science has been depoliticised to reinforce, as opposed to alleviate, unequal arrangements of power that inhibit societal transformation. To combat this, we suggest that community science must develop a more explicit comprehension of power and how it relates to the use and production of knowledge. Informed by the Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge, we argue for a politicised paradigm of community science that recognises how transformation requires pluralism, the contestation of knowledge, and learning amongst all community science actors. This review concludes by considering how transformative community science could introduce new ways of knowing to marine governance and facilitate more active community participation.

Introduction

The concept of community science,¹ a participatory research approach wherein members of the public produce scientific knowledge in contributory, collaborative, or co-production processes, has produced promising opportunities in a marine context (Garcia-Soto et al., 2021). By enhancing the scope of monitoring efforts, and empowering local communities to engage with initiatives that seek to protect the oceans, community science provides an important source of scientific research on maritime challenges, including, rising sea levels, over-fishing, and ocean acidification (Kelly et al., 2020; Sandahl and Tøttrup, 2020). Community science has been advanced as a cost-effective means of producing knowledge to inform marine policy (Hyder et al., 2015; Schläppy et al., 2017), to broaden the engagement of communities with governance processes (Turrini et al., 2018) and to instil scientific and environmental learning amongst participants (Haywood, 2016). Due to this, community science is framed by academics and practitioners as a participatory approach that can, through the production of new knowledge, transform conservation management into more transparent, socially relevant, and democratic processes (Couvet and Prevot, 2015; Grossberndt et al., 2021; Loos et al., 2015; Peters and Besley, 2019). In marine governance, where decision-makers are often guided by hegemonic agendas (Tafon, 2018) and informed by the knowledge of dominant stakeholders (Said and Trouillet, 2020), community science has been suggested as a potentially transformative solution to unjust and undemocratic processes (Flannery et al., 2019). The way community science researchers and practitioners have conceptualised ‘transformation’ is, however, rather limited, and is often blind to power issues.

In this paper, we define ‘transformation’ as a fundamental form of change that is greater than progressive or incremental shifts. Transformation is described as a significant reordering, one that challenges existing structures to produce something fundamentally different (Blythe et al., 2018; Geels et al., 2017). Scholars have outlined how the realisation of ocean governance transformation is dependent upon paradigm shifts within existing structures of governance (Olsson et al., 2014). Discussing how to prepare for transformative change, Blythe et al. (2021: 261) state the importance of “the identification of a governance related challenge, growing social support for governance change and the communication of compelling narratives”. We argue that community science can provide many of the required conditions for ocean governance transformation to be instigated, specifically because of the active participation that it supports and the diverse range of knowledge that it can produce.

The need for transformational change to how marine governance processes facilitate public participation (Bennett et al., 2019; Saunders et al., 2020; Fudge et al., 2021; Tafon et al., 2021) and incorporate different types of knowledge has become more evident in recent years (Said and Trouillet, 2020; Peters, 2020). Community science has been positioned by its champions as having the capacity to instigate change to how these challenges are managed in marine governance, yet literature illustrates an under-appreciation of how truly transformative change must involve actions that challenge dominant power relations. Turnhout et al. (2020) argue that ‘depoliticisation’ in the realm of co-production has led to participatory processes inadvertently reinforcing, as opposed to mitigating, unequal power relations. Community science that ineffectively challenges dominant power arrangements can, therefore, prevent the development of transformative practices and the instigation of meaningful change (Mach et al., 2020). Although some studies have begun to critically analyse the role of power in co-production processes, revealing crucial insights about transformation barriers that participatory interventions can encounter and how they can be prevented (see Lemos et al., 2018; Oliver et al., 2019), power remains an underexplored topic in the community science literature. While studies have revealed significant insight into transformative learning (see Bela et al., 2016; Ruiz-Mallén et al., 2016), a more explicit understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge must be developed by community science actors if the potential of community science is to be realised.

We argue that the transformative capacity of projects must be understood in terms of how community science knowledge is shaped by and produces power. Our argument is built upon the premise that power and knowledge are co-constitutive, hence the Foucauldian terminology of ‘power/knowledge’, meaning that they are inextricably linked to each other and cannot exist independently (Foucault, 1980). Power/knowledge relations define what is important and what is possible in the realm of action, supporting particular developments while suppressing others (Sheridan, 1977).

We contend that if community science is to transform both how communities can participate in marine governance and how knowledge is integrated into decision-making processes, it must become politicised and acknowledge the array of power relations that define which knowledge is important and how it is used. As the concept of power/knowledge outlines, power is not a zero-sum game. Power can be challenged, resisted, and changed by developing other power/knowledge relations (Foucault, 1980). Power/knowledge arrangements can, therefore, both limit and enable action. We suggest that, by becoming conscious of the duality of power/knowledge, community science research and practice can develop a greater understanding of why attempts to instigate transformation fail, and how such barriers can be overcome. We posit that it is only by adopting more power-aware approaches that community science can realise its potential to transform marine governance into more democratic and transparent processes.

In the next section, we clarify the need to address the political and power dimensions of community science and discuss why this is important for both theory and practice. We begin by reviewing the current framings of community science and problematise how transformation has been conceptualised within the literature. The concept of power/knowledge is then outlined to demonstrate how it can inform an alternative community science paradigm that corrects for current limitations. This is followed by a discussion of how politicising community science can contribute to a better understanding of how and why projects often fail to instigate transformation and how persistent challenges can be prevented. To conclude, we consider how power-aware community science initiatives can practically work to transform the problems underpinning marine governance regimes and suggest how this topic could be examined further.