Kimberley Peters

This intervention brings debates about tipping points into conversation with critical geographical thinking to suggest a more ‘oblique’ engagement with the concept. Such an approach is vital for rethinking the normative discourses and established imaginaries that dominate in the application of ‘tipping’ to understandings of environmental change. The use of the term ‘tipping point’ has grown exponentially over the last two decades within environmental sciences to describe accelerated, self‐amplifying and often irreversible changes to environmental systems. It has also garnered significant momentum in policy debates. Yet it is far from a universally lauded concept, with widespread concerns in the sciences about the validity and usefulness of defining such catastrophic points of no return and within the social sciences and humanities about the politics and ethics of tipping points. This intervention argues that human geography has a key role to play in this complex landscape in furthering critical engagements with tipping points as the concept continues to unfold and take hold. It calls for an unfixing of dominant understandings and framings through key geographical ideas: space and scale, time and temporalities and a/effect. These geographical ideas permit a redirection in current debates, especially around governance. Much is at stake in such a critique where tipping points may be productively questioned, imagined as something otherwise, or even outright refused as a guiding concept of our times. More equitable enquiries may emerge as a result.

This chapter addresses the phraseology of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 14 in its attention to ‘Life Below Water’. It engages concepts from Indigenous scholarship, and the humanities and social sciences informed by such work, to show how SDG 14 may be limited by its attention to life ‘under’ the water line, rather than envisioning three-dimensional ocean worlds of height and depth – above surface, surface, and subsurface. It shows the webs and lines of connection that link oceans to a wider remit of spaces and places, and the entangled relations than forge deep kinships with the oceans, understanding them as more than separate realms and extractive frontiers. The chapter does not develop this argument to comment on the ability of SDG 14 to succeed. Rather, it does so to posit the importance of engaging ideas that challenge (or resist) the very logics that ‘govern approaches to governing’ and to repoliticise ocean governance.

The recurring recognition of the inseparable interconnection between societies and marine environments has led to the desire to move beyond traditional silos of scientific understanding. Integrating discrete disciplines from marine social and natural sciences is increasingly attempted to tackle cross-boundary research challenges. Consequently, much literature focuses on why and how to design and implement interdisciplinary projects. There is surprisingly less attention to the delivery of such projects—how to write and publish their results. Drawing from our writing and publishing experiences within different interdisciplinary projects, we shed light on the challenges we are facing and how to overcome them. We reflect on why good interdisciplinary writing matters and demonstrate the omission of work on writing and publishing in interdisciplinary teams in marine science literature, before we offer guidance towards effective writing relationships. Better understanding diverse writing and publishing traditions is essential in harnessing the full potential of cutting-edge interdisciplinary marine scholarship. Writing from the front lines as a marine social and a marine natural scientist, this paper mixes academic styles: third person narration with first person testimony, to argue that writing challenges need to be openly discussed and to showcase how to work towards successful integration.

Joining others who call attention to the ways in which the ocean, its spaces, and its resources are being commodified, enclosed, and extracted in ways that benefit some at the expense of others, this paper offers a synthesis and review, echoing and extending the cautions being posited around ocean privatisation discourses and their tendencies toward simplistic conceptualisations and presentist thinking that all too often limit critical analysis. Therefore, this paper synthesises and analyses existing literature on the institutions and processes through which the ‘privatisation’ of the ocean has been, and is being, implemented, leading to two important points. First, it is showed how privatisation processes are often more complex than the word suggests. Privatisation is anything but ‘private’. The enclosure, appropriation, and rationalisation of space, resources, knowledge, and governance in the marine domain are occurring in institutional matrices where private actors operate in an array of relationships with the state (in its many, multiple guises), as well as non-governmental, and inter-governmental actors. Secondly, when viewing privatisation with a sensitivity to the array of institutions and actors involved, it is vital to recognise that what passes for a more recent capitalist tendency in the ocean realm rather continues long-standing, historical trajectories of violent extraction (which are equally complex in configuration). Expanding on these critiques, this paper turns to longstanding traditions that offer ways of thinking beyond privatisation and that engage the ocean not as a space of enclosure and extraction but as a space of relationality and livelihoods.

This chapter provides an introduction to the book ‘Ocean Governance (Beyond) Borders’, a text that that shifts across varying oceanic terrains to offer, in one collection, a sustained reflection on bordering and oceans, written by those central to researching and reflecting on such debates. The chapter reviews some of the longstanding literature on borders, boundaries and enclosures from across different disciplines, including human geography and international relations, before examining such ideas in the particular context of the seas and oceans. It provides a backdrop to the ways borders are planned, enacted, monitored and enforced but also the ways in which they are porous, leaky, subject to change, transgressed and contested, all in a largely mobile medium—the seas and oceans—that are ever resistant to bordering. The chapter offers a discussion of (en)closures as a means of opening up debates central to the book, to introduce the key themes that weave through the chapters, as well as briefly summarizing the chapters that comprise the collection. The chapter ends with ideas to frame readers’ engagement with the book, and some thoughts on how the contributions herein might be navigated.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between borders and belonging in marine worlds, paying special attention to debates concerning marine invasive species. Within a number of natural and social science disciplines, studies of invasive species are both long-established and continuing to grow and change. Major research into marine ‘invasions’ has come later than terrestrial studies, so critical social scholarship in invasive species (or bioinvasion) remain largely (though not exclusively) landlocked. Where studies are watery, they are of fresh, rather than salt water and ‘interior’ rather than focusing on ‘exterior’ liquid zones. This chapter has two aims. It firstly identifies invasive species as a topical issue that is marginal in critical discussions of ocean bordering/belonging. It secondly puts forwards three ways in which bioinvasion, bordering and belonging can be better understood, through (1) questions of definition and meaning; (2) an attention to the mobilities and materialities enrolled within processes of bioinvasion—the movement of marine species in global circuits; and (3) how borders are enacted in view of invasive species via biosecurity measures. The chapter aims to disrupt conventional narratives of marine belonging, showing a biological world that is ‘stitched’ together.