Toward a Critical Environmental Justice Approach to Ocean Equity

Abstract

Recent oceans sustainability, coastal community development, and ocean governance policy discourse among academics and practitioners increasingly invokes “equity” and “ocean equity.” But, to what end? While this new focus may be a positive development for these fields, this article argues that the conceptualization of equitable approaches to oceanic production and consumption remains rooted in market-liberal environmentalist as well as unproblematized global developmentalist logics, revealing tensions about whom equity notions may serve in practice. Via theoretical and conceptual development drawn from the emerging literature on this topic, the article draws attention to how critical environmental justice scholarship provides a necessary intervention for ocean equity. If the goal is to achieve equitable ocean outcomes, it is necessary to reckon with and undermine logics that continue to structure social inequality, dominate labor, and create the present ocean governance situation as ruled by global development and bourgeois environmentalist organizations. Furthermore, scholars, activists, practitioners, and anyone else working toward equity in, on, and around oceans should fight against any banalization of the term ocean equity, so that it can maintain its underlying socially progressive, and hopefully emancipatory, potential.