SOCPacific2R has emerged from – and is therefore a logical extension of – the interdisciplinary research project ‘A Sea of Connections: Contextualizing Fisheries in the South Pacific Region’ (SOCPacific, 2018-2022).
Through a main geographical focus on Fiji, New Caledonia and Vanuatu, SOCPacific aimed at a better understanding and recognition of fisheries in the South Pacific; a region that has become a central stage for imagining the future of the world’s oceans and their governance.
Overall, SOCPacific conceptualized South Pacific fisheries as embedded in “a sea of connections”. This notion highlights the multiple meanings, dimensions and expressions of ocean connectivity from/in Oceania.
It also emphasizes that Oceanian knowledges, cosmologies, socialities, spiritualities, values, norms/forms of governance, and sovereignties are central to ensuring the health of the Pacific Ocean, considered all at once as the planet’s largest ocean, a common heritage, the scene of an unequalled rush for space and resources, a four-dimension (including depth and time) oceanscape, and a more-than-human entity.
Looking ahead, we identified a research gap requiring urgent attention: to date, little research had provided knowledge on the multi-faceted social-ecological significance of reef passages (breaks and channels in the barrier and fringing reefs). This made clear that our future research should focus on these “ecological and cultural keystone places”. Hence the co-production by our USP-IRD-ZMT team of the follow-up research project “A Sea of Connections: Valuing Reef Passages in the South Pacific Region” (SOCPacific2R)!
