Kristen Ounanian

The Nordic countries are ranked among the most gender equal countries worldwide. Equality, political, and civil rights, leading to the high participation of women in the workforce, have paved the way for this egalitarian view. However, women remain the minority in managerial positions in general, and they are also strongly underrepresented in many male‐dominated sectors of the blue economy. The aim of this article is to introduce and discuss gender equality in the blue economy, and to assess the status of gender research in the Nordic context. To achieve this, a purposive interdisciplinary literature review resulted in three encompassing themes on how women’s participation is hindered, overlooked, and undervalued. Using these themes as an analytical lens, we propose that the underlying mechanisms are similar within fisheries, aquaculture, and maritime transportation in how they affect women’s participation. Still, there is a lack of statistics and research within parts of the blue sector. To move forward, there needs to be a shift in focus from policy to practice. One starting point could be to implement current knowledge, e.g., regarding workplace design and tailoring equipment to fit a diverse workforce. We call for scaling up best practices and evaluating policy performance and effectiveness. These are prerequisites for sustainable recruitment and retention of the blue sector workforce and the only way forward for countries aspiring to be truly gender equal.

Coastal communities have long been at the periphery of human geography. Nonetheless, the coasts present a rich context to understand and deconstruct processes of displacement—enclosure, ocean grabbing, gentrification, and financialization—and the salience of adjacency claims as resistance. While scholars have theorized that the coast’s spatial specificity may enable communities to raise adjacency claims, scholarship has not reconciled the degree to which coastal communities should benefit from marine resources and ocean spaces. This displacement-adjacency framework and research agenda provide a lens to study discourses, cases of contestation, and the potency of such protests of interrelated coastal displacement processes.

Since the second half of the 20th century, Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) has been the guiding principle of fisheries management, focused on reaching sustainability through bioeconomic modelling and harvest regulations. MSY has allowed managers to set Total Allowable Catch levels for target species with further implications for various forms of catch share programs. In this article, we employ a feminist ethic of care approach and literature on local environmental stewardship to analyze the case of a Danish environmental organization trying to introduce another dimension to fisheries management grounded on the concept of care and collective responsibility. The case includes two related attempts of establishing ecolabelling schemes for small-scale fisheries focused on a concept of careful/gentle fishing. Through the case study, we trace how a management focus on yield hinders the care perspective but also engenders forms of local and national resistance.

This chapter portrays what is often overlooked in research—that it involves not simply design, data collection, and analysis, but also failure and redesign. To demystify the process, it presents the evolution of a study of six coastal communities from a mixed methods qualitative and quantitative approach to a qualitative macroethnography. Intending to employ an innovative method, the Factorial Survey Approach, the researcher confronted serious challenges in the process, engendering reflections on (a) the limitations of the method, specifically in fishing communities, (b) the pressure to prove methodological bilingualism as an interdisciplinary graduate student, and (c) individual ontological growth. The chapter considers the collective tendency in (social) science to conceal the imperfections of field research, obscuring insights gained from situations when things do not go according to plan.

In the North Sea, many oil and gas fields will reach the end of their productivity and their associated structures will be decommissioned. OSPAR decision 98/3 prescribes removal of all disused offshore structures as the only acceptable decommissioning option. This policy is the legacy of the 1995 Brent Spar incident, which resulted in the current dominant discourse of ‘Hands off the Oceans,’ ruling out the conversion of oil and gas rigs into artificial reefs (Rigs-to-Reefs (RtR)). The shift from a conservation to a restoration paradigm could open up the RtR debate. In this paper, a discourse analysis is carried out to discern whether and how ideas about RtR and ecosystem restoration are articulated to challenge the dominant ‘Hands off the Oceans’ discourse and thereby bring about change in North Sea decommissioning policy. A discourse analytic framework is applied to elucidate whether an ‘RtR as Restoration’ discourse can be distinguished and how competing claims are presented in the various storylines. Our analysis shows an ‘RtR as Restoration’ discourse, consisting of four different storylines. Given the fragmented nature of this discourse, the ‘RtR as Restoration’ discourse will not overcome the dominant ‘Hands off the Oceans’ discourse.

This article considers how remoteness, rurality, and local initiatives combine to enable community responses to the threat of fisheries enclosure. Centred on two case studies from a wider portfolio of six cases in Northern Jutland, Denmark and New England, USA, the article presents a narrative of these places based on semi‐structured interviews and participant observation. Thorupstrand, Denmark and Cutler, Maine, USA exemplify communities fighting to retain access to fisheries under enclosure and recognition of this threat. Lacking alternatives due to their geographic and infrastructural isolation, the two cases typify existential fisheries dependence, indicating that they would not be on the map without fishing to sustain them.Their precarious positions compelled many in the communities to act and preserve the fishing industry and culture. Although Thorupstrand and Cutler diverge in their approaches to maintaining fishing access, they collectively speak to the overlooked connection between fisheries management and rural places.