July – month of conferences

Over the past month Janne attended three conferences and seminars and presented findings from her research at each of them. From 5-7 July the MARE conference ‘People & the Sea IX: Dealing with Maritime Mobilities’  took place at the University of Amsterdam (NL). Organized by the Centre for Maritime Research (MARE), an interdisciplinary social science network organization working on the use and management of marine resources, the event comprised over 50 panels related to Maritime Governance, Fisheries Management, Coastal Livelihoods and Vulnerabilities, as well as Social Relations and Culture. Janne presented a paper (provisionally) entitled ‘A legal pluralism perspective on coastal fisheries governance in Fiji and Solomon Islands’ in one of the sessions on Fisheries Governance.

The following week (10-14 July) the XVI Biennial Conference of The International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC) ‘Practicing the commons: Self-governance, cooperation, and institutional change’ took place at the University of Utrecht (NL). Over 600 scholars and practitioners from all over the world shared their experiences and ideas on the governance of common-pool resources. Hence, the thematic scope was larger and not exclusively focusing on the marine realm, but covering all sorts of commons, e.g., including in the agriculture and forest sector. Here, Janne gave a presentation on drivers of local marine governance in coral-reef social-ecological systems (SES) in Melanesia using Ostrom’s SES framework.

The third meeting (16-21 July) was a more practice-oriented seminar held by The International Academy for Nature Conservation (INA) of the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN), in cooperation with the GIZ GmbH – Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit and KfW – German Development Bank on the beautiful island of Vilm in the north of Germany. The topic of the seminar was ‘Biodiversity Conservation for Human Wellbeing’. Throughout the week participants engaged with the most relevant concepts, tools and trends in biodiversity conservation with regard to development cooperation, and exchanged their own experiences in interactive sessions, working groups and plenaries. Janne gave an overview presentation into marine governance, with examples of opportunities and challenges in a South Pacific context. Overall, the workshop was useful to see how biodiversity conservation and related tools, e.g. protected areas, are used and seen from a development cooperation perspective – and allowed for some thinking outside the ‘academic sphere’.