Work

For the Love of the Sea: Technocratic Environmentalism and the Struggle to Sustain Community-Led Aquaculture

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This article argues that sustainability governance in small-scale regenerative aquaculture arises less from formal regulation than from the relational, ethical, and temporal labour of practitioners. Based on an ethnographic study of Câr-y-Môr, Wales’s first community-owned regenerative ocean farm, the research combines over 250 h of participant observation, 25 interviews, and document analysis with transdisciplinary humanities-informed sustainability science (THiSS). The study shows how technocratic environmentalism, reliant on auditing, reporting, and standardised procedures, often clashes with the shifting rhythms of tides, weather, and the embodied work of marine labour. Ethnography uniquely reveals the embodied knowledge, improvisation, and moral commitment through which practitioners continually remake governance, translating bureaucratic rules into ecologically and socially meaningful practice. The findings demonstrate that adaptive governance requires recognition of local and experiential expertise, proportionate regulatory frameworks, and protected spaces for experimentation and learning. Seen in this way, sustainability shifts from a fixed goal to a relational process. When governance learns from practice and care is recognised as a form of knowledge, it becomes more adaptive, situated, and responsive, revealing both the constraints of technocratic control and the possibilities of care-based policy and practice.

Source: Sustainability

DOI: 10.3390/su172210136

Authors: Gareth Thomas, Louise Steel, Luci Attala

Institution: University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Language: English

Topic: Coastal and Marine Management

Subfield: Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

Field: Environmental Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDGs: Life below water, Responsible consumption and production

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,896