Narratives, uncertainties, and governance arrangements in marine ecosystem restoration

Managing marine environments has evolved from dominant interests in exploitation, allocation, conservation, and protection to restoration. Presently, governance of marine restoration is nascent—if it exists at all. Compared to terrestrial and freshwater environments, restoration of and in marine ecosystems presents a new mode of management intervention with both technical and governance challenges. The governance perspective accounts for the interactions and interdependencies of multiple authorities and competing maritime activities at different governance levels (with different economic, political, social, and cultural interests). This also necessitates acknowledging, mobilizing, and using different narratives of marine ecosystem restoration, and being confronted with different forms of uncertainty, such as incomplete knowledge, unpredictability, and ambiguity. Thus, this paper’s objective is to understand the enabling and constraining factors for governing marine ecosystem restoration given different forms of uncertainty and restoration narratives. Restoration includes myriad techniques ranging from passive to active interventions with different motivations as why to restore marine ecosystems. The paper proposes a conceptual model of the narratives of marine ecosystem restoration built on two dimensions: (1) the degree of human intervention and (2) its philosophical underpinnings. These philosophical underpinnings of restoration range in degree of anthropocentrism to ecocentrism. Together these dimensions create four, broad narratives of restoration, which can then be combined with different uncertainties confronted in a range of marine habitats, depths, and distances from shore. The paper’s overall contribution is the synthesis of these seemingly disparate components (narratives of restoration, uncertainty in decision making, and governance arrangements) and aims to understand the enabling and constraining conditions to govern marine ecosystem restoration initiatives. The paper will use the conceptual model to identify illustrative case studies to further explore how combinations of narratives and uncertainties relate to evolving governance of marine space.