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A Sea of Connections

Contextualizing Fisheries in the South Pacific Region (SOCPacific)

Welcome to our SOCPacific website – for an overview, please download our Flyer!

SOCPacific has been set up in response to the Franco-German Call in Humanities and Social Sciences (FRAL) jointly run by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). It will be funded by these two national research funding institutions for three years (mid-2018 to mid-2021).

This project is based on an institutional partnership between the French National Research Institute for Development (www.IRD.fr) and the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (www.leibniz-ZMT.de). Its principal investigators are Elodie Fache (Anthropology) and Annette Breckwoldt (Marine ecology + Social sciences). The core team includes 13 additional persons (9 researchers and 4 PhD students).

The two SOCPacific-funded PhD students are Ms Juliette Kon Kam King and Ms Léa Riéra, and here are 2019 snapshots of their dissertation topics:

A sea under watch: monitoring and surveilling fishes and fishers in the South Pacific.

By Juliette Kon Kam King

This PhD project observes the changing practices of surveilling/monitoring offshore areas and their inhabitants, both human and non-human, following the creation of the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in the Pacific, with a specific focus on Fiji and New Caledonia. It accounts for the diversification of interests regarding offshore spaces and the development of new Monitoring, Control and Surveillance (MCS) technologies and practices, to interrogate the political effects of these transformations related to offshore governance.

Fisheries in the South Pacific: (Dis-)Connecting science, resource management and conservation. An interdisciplinary and comparative study between Fiji and New Caledonia.

By Léa Riera

This PhD research project explores the integration of global conservation objectives into fisheries-related policies and their practical implementation in Fiji and in New Caledonia. Over the last 20 years, this integration has translated into successions of measures of protection for marine species and spaces, providing new roadmaps for regional, national and local coastal fisheries management schemes. This comparative and multi-level study has identified two main, interrelated results of these changes: (1) the scaling-up of management instruments (e.g. protected areas, species bans, size regulations), and (2) the transformation of governance models through the construction of new multi-stakeholder coalitions. 

The interdisciplinary SOCPacific project thus anchors in anthropology, geography and political ecology, in dialogue with natural sciences (marine biology, ecology, geology). It offers a cross-sectional and multi-level approach to fisheries in Oceania, based largely on empirical social science research.

Dr. Elodie Fache: elodie.fache@ird.fr

Dr. Annette Breckwoldt: annette.breckwoldt@leibniz-zmt.de

This project is an Affiliated Activity of Future Earth Coasts,

a Global Research Project of Future Earth.