Human-induced change in marine ecosystems has greatly increased in the past 60 years. According to the European Environment Agency, the seas have become busier places, driven by a combination of technological advances and society’s increasing demand for food, energy and other resources. The EU-funded AQUATIC project investigated the environmental threats to marine ecosystems in the Mediterranean Sea. More concretely, it followed the collaborative work of researchers, public administration, and civil society in the Balearic Islands to protect the emblematic seagrass Posidonia oceanica from anthropogenic pressures like nautical tourism, beach replenishment practices, and the effects of waste discharges to the sea. Given the central role that Posidonia plays in marine and coastal ecosystems, at stake is not just the health of the Balearic Sea, but the future of the tourism industry in the Balearics.
The project was designed to use social theory about human-nonhuman interaction, temporal narratives and intersectionality to understand how different collectives collaborate with each other and how they engage in direct interventions to care for and protect Posidonia.
Temporal narratives emerged in the data as a factor explaining the rationale behind recent changes in public knowledge, the rise in funding across sectors, and the emergence of a new sector of civil society focusing on marine issues. Narratives of responsibility were also established in temporal ways. Evoking a past of abuse allowed stakeholders to frame current actions and initiatives in a positive manner. However, this is not enough to remove existing anthropogenic pressures. These continue since the economic and political trends that initially motivated stakeholders (generally associated to economic growth associated to the dominant tourism industry of the Balearic Islands) are hard to redirect.
In order to accomplish that redirection a broad societal engagement is necessary, something that is well known among stakeholders. Furthermore, it was also clear that key initiatives for seagrass protection in fact rely on the involvement of stakeholder collectives beyond regulatory mandates and professional duties, that is, on the involvement of volunteer labour. This emerged in great part as a way to compensate for a lack of resources to fully implement protection initiatives: as such, non-governmental actors like volunteering populations, the private sector or scientists became key contributors to the implementation of some parts of the regulation, like monitoring and surveillance. This demonstrated that the typical social categorization between different sectors in terms of responsibilities and economic resources obscured the complex relations and mergers amongst social categories.
