Words by Ben McAteer

Dr. Ben McAteer is a social scientist from Northern Ireland, currently working at Queen's University Belfast. His research interests include marine conservation, participatory research and sustainability.

You can learn more about Ben at the Marine Social Science Research Group website, and follow him on Twitter @benmcateer.

‘Community science’ is understood as the involvement of members of the public in scientific research. In recent years, community science projects have gained momentum and have been recognised as a valuable approach that can transform governance into more transparent, socially relevant, and democratic endeavours.

In the marine context, where the prioritisation of economic knowledge and the marginalisation of local communities are growing concerns, community science has been advanced as a potential solution to 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. This paper seeks to address this gap by initiating a discussion on the political and power dimensions of marine community science.

Drawing on the broader field of co-production, it is argued that community science has been depoliticised to reinforce, as opposed to alleviate, unequal arrangements of power that inhibit societal transformation. To combat this, this paper suggests that marine community science must develop a more explicit comprehension of power and how it relates to the use and production of 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.

Read the science

McAteer, B., & Flannery, W. (2022). Power, knowledge and the transformative potential of marine community science. Ocean & Coastal Management, 218, 106036. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2022.106036.

An open access pre-print version is also available here.

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