The UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development is a global initiative to change how we cocreate and share knowledge. We need to find new ways of creating self-organising, bottom-up learning and impact networks.
Stakeholders, researchers, funders, and facilitators need to be able to connect with each other. Experience, concerns, and potential solutions – many of which only reside in people’s heads – need to be shared fluidly, openly, and in near-real time, unimpeded by language barriers or access and use of technology. Innovative approaches should be grounded in breaking free from top-down, hierarchical systems to find new ways of enabling everyone involved in the co-creation of Ocean knowledge to form self-organising networks to inform policy.
However, while the transformative capacity of ocean networks is increasingly necessary, it is also untapped in its full potential. Partnerships of people with different knowledge backgrounds drive countless marine research and policy initiatives, but are often afterthoughts or lack committed resources, therefore achieving sub-optimal impacts.