Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MARIPOLDATA (The Politics of Marine Biodiversity Data: Global and National Policies and Practices of Monitoring the Oceans)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2020-05-01 do 2021-10-31
In examining how marine biodiversity science and data are represented and used by state and nonstate actors during the negotiations and by combing these observations with a systematic study of the marine biodiversity field across regions, this project creates a novel understanding of the materiality of science-policy interrelations and identifies new forms of power in global environmental politics as well as develops the methodologies to do so.
This is crucial because the capacities to develop and use science and data infrastructures are unequally distributed among countries and global initiatives for scientific collaboration and data sharing are significantly challenged by conflicting perceptions of who benefits from marine biodiversity research. Despite broad recognition of these challenges within natural science communities, the political aspects of marine biodiversity data remain understudied. Academic debates tend to neglect the role of international politics in legitimising and authorising scientific concepts, data sources and criteria and how this influences national monitoring priorities and practices of ocean protection.
The central objective of MARIPOLDATA is to overcome these shortcomings by developing and applying a new multiscale methodology for grounding the analysis of science-policy interrelations in empirical research.
Due to COVID-19, the last negotiation round was postponed to 2022. To continue our research, we adapted our methodology and conducted a survey in May 2020. We identified online initiatives and communication channels set up to maintain negotiation momentum and examined the challenges and opportunities of digital diplomacy for multilateral environmental agreement making, as well as the study thereof. We also discussed future avenues for global environmental politics research and explored the application of digital ethnographies to study online or hybrid formats used in multilateral environmental diplomacy.
In order to situate the science and knowledge that matters during the negotiations (physical and online) we mapped the field of marine biodiversity research based on bibliometric data and analysed the effects of scientific collaboration, especially between the Global North and the Global South. Our data revealed that the US and Europe’s usual suspects allocate a significant proportion of collaboration capital from all regions. In turn, regional research networks in Asia, South America, and Africa are severely underdeveloped.
Instead of mapping the field based on quantitative data only, we complemented our maps with oral history interviews with 20 key marine biodiversity scientists from different regions and scientific disciplines. These 6-hour interviews that are still work in progress allow us to dive deeper into the development of the marine biodiversity field and how it has been shaped by legal, political and economic orders, new technological developments, national research priorities, and industrial interest in the exploration and exploitation of marine resources. In order to capture how these factors and dynamics, influence the day-to-day practices of marine biodiversity research and monitoring we have selected three cases: Brazil, the US and the European Union. We will compare these cases by drawing on the data collected at the different sites and levels of our empirical research: the BBNJ negotiations, the scientific field of marine biodiversity, the oral histories of key scientists and the practices of studying and monitoring marine biodiversity.