Project
OR ELSE Project (Operational Recommendations for Ecosystem-based Large-scale Sand Extraction)
Sand is vital to marine ecosystems, acting as a crucial link between sea and land, sustaining biodiversity, fostering economic growth, and supporting the livelihoods of coastal communities. However, sand is the second most exploited natural resource after water. Due to this high demand, inland sand resources are declining rapidly, resulting in a worldwide shift from inland extraction activities towards marine sand mining. The OR ELSE project focuses on exploring ecosystem-based strategies to face the challenge of adapting to the ecological and social effects of marine sand extraction now and in the future.
OR ELSE overview
As partners in the OR ELSE project, the Environmental Policy Group (ENP) is involved in two interrelated research work packages (WPs) under the joint supervision of Dr Hilde Toonen (Co-promotor) and Prof Simon Bush (Promotor). Research within these WPs focuses on how challenges like adopting reflexive and dynamic approaches to marine governance can be addressed. Using sand (extraction) as a case in point, we place emphasis on stakeholder interactions through two complementary perspectives.
The first aligns more closely with the dominant paradigm of marine governance, focusing on learning and change that can take place within existing institutional frameworks, through utilizing technologies like a digital simulation game (WP 2.0 - Institutional Learning and Change, Postdoc researcher: Dr Maria Pafi).
The other perspective adopts a critical lens, looking beyond established paradigms of marine governance to examine assumptions about inclusivity and the ways diverse spatial and temporal understandings of the sea and the ecological impacts from different activities are understood, contested, included in, or excluded from decision-making (WP 2.1 - Marine actors and governance processes, PhD student: Elaine Mumford).