OOSC 2025: Ocean and maritime governance, a Town hall meeting at the heart of BRIDGES' challenges

OOSC 2025: Ocean and maritime governance,

a Town hall meeting at the heart of BRIDGES’ challenges

At the One Ocean Science Conference (OOSC) in Nice, Brice Trouillet, co-leader of BRIDGES CO-CONSTRUCTION, will lead a Town hall meeting entitled “Ocean and Maritime Governance” (session TM5 – Monday June 3, 2025, from 12:45 to 1:45 pm, in Port Olympia Room 5). Organized by the GdR OMER (and more specifically the GOM working group, represented by Brice, Sophie Lanco and Pascale Ricard), this exchange will offer a critical and plural reflection on the challenges of governance of maritime and coastal spaces.

The session will seek to bring scientific disciplines into dialogue with the spheres of political decision-making, by questioning the environmental practices and transformations resulting from past and present forms of governance. More than just an academic exchange, the Town Hall aims to build bridges between science and politics, so as to co-construct approaches adapted to contemporary issues.

Five international speakers will bring their perspectives from a variety of geographical and institutional contexts:

Edward Allison (WorldFish, Malaysia) – also a member of the BRIDGES International Scientific Advisory Board
Ratana Chuenpagdee (Memorial University, Canada)
Ndickou Gaye (Cheick Anta Diop University, Senegal)
Catarina Frazão Santos (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
Rafael Magris (Chico Mendes Institute, Brazil)

Based on structuring questions on disciplinary perspectives, obstacles to good governance, and the place of research in these dynamics, the session will culminate in the production of a one-page summary document, intended to feed into policy discussions on an international scale.

This Town Hall resonates directly with the objectives of BRIDGES, which focuses on maritime governance issues in the southwest Indian Ocean. Through its interdisciplinary and participatory dynamics, BRIDGES actively contributes to the emergence of inclusive, sustainable and research-informed forms of governance, in line with the ambition of this Town Hall: to build an insightful dialogue between science and politics for a shared oceanic future.

Biosketch

Brice Trouillet is a professor of geography at the University of Nantes who specialises in the social geography of the marine environment. His research concentrates on the dynamics of human activities at sea and on maritime governance, particularly maritime spatial planning. His work is based on the spectrum of Science & Technology Studies and critical approaches and uses the example of fishing activities in the
context of maritime spatial planning to study more specifically the interweaving of power relations and knowledge in (geo)technological resources like data, types of knowledge, planning documents or cartographic representation. The end goal is to shape the ‘socio-technical arrangements’ that mediate relations with the marine ‘environment’. Also in this area of research, he is increasingly focusing on informational issues (production, processing, representation, circulation, use) and the associated issues of power, drawing on thinking and results from the Digital Geographies.