Restoring marine natures in Southeast Asia and beyond: Geopolitics meets the politics of care

Overview

A growing number of ecological restoration programs world-wide aims to reverse the decline of ocean health by repairing and rebuilding marine and coastal natures. These efforts reveal a shift from protecting nature towards more active human intervention to shape new natures for an uncertain future. In this shift, narratives of care, sustainability and calls to radically transform how we know and relate to the sea mix with technoscientific enterprises to scale up restoration at increasing speed and scale. Both global geopolitical dynamics and local ecologies of human-sea relations based on different philosophies of nature are at play.

While there is rising critique on restoration as a form of western ecological imperialism, what is less understood is the role of non-western philosophies – in particular Chinese and traditional understandings of nature – in the current re-building of marine nature at scale. Through a cultural-political lens on Chinese-supported marine restoration projects in Southeast Asia, this research aims to:

1) Map where Chinese investments in marine restoration are occurring globally, with more in depth mapping of those in Southeast Asia.

2) Analyze how different knowledges and values of human-sea relations come together in ecological restoration projects through select comparative case studies in Southeast Asia.

3) Examine the (geo)political consequences: what/who is in-/excluded in how marine natures are re-imagined and reshaped for the future?

4) Identifying how politics of care and geopolitics offer insights into global governance of marine restoration.

Investigating these aims, this project involves fieldwork in restoration sites, on-site research stations and labs, interviews, participant observation in restoration practices and the review and comparison of scientific literature and policy documents.