Uniting Diverse Knowledge Systems for a Healthier Global Ocean

An international team of researchers has published a sweeping analysis of how the global ocean community speaks about, produces, and governs knowledge of the sea, arguing that the celebrated vision of a single, unified “One Ocean” is far more fractured, political, and contested than its promotional framing suggests. The study, published in the journal npj Ocean Sustainability, draws on firsthand observation at two of the most consequential ocean events of the decade: the One Ocean Science Congress (OOSC) and the Third United Nations Oceans Conference, both held in Nice, France, in June 2025. The authors, an interdisciplinary group of geographers, political scientists, and ocean scholars based in the United States, Canada, Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and Austria, use those meetings as a laboratory for examining what they call “One Ocean Science” and its complicated relationship with difference, plurality, and equity.

The timing of the analysis matters. The meetings in Nice took place under the umbrella of the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, an ambitious international initiative explicitly designed to produce ocean science that fosters equity and sustainability. The “One Ocean” framing that unified participants in Nice was intended to be just that, a unifying banner under which nations, scientific institutions, Indigenous communities, industry, and civil society could coordinate their efforts on behalf of a shared planetary resource. Yet according to the researchers, the very act of framing the ocean as one, and the science that describes it as universal, raises difficult questions about whose knowledge counts, whose ways of knowing the ocean are included, and what happens to knowledges that do not fit the universal template.

The authors bring considerable methodological firepower to the question. They draw on their prior scholarship on new data technologies and ocean governance, combined with participant observation at both the congress and the conference. This ethnographic approach allowed them to watch, in real time, how universalist claims about ocean knowledge were made, negotiated, and occasionally disrupted on the international stage. Their findings, distilled into the new paper, center on three sites where the tension between universalism and difference was most visible: the tendency to render the oceans technical rather than political, the persistent and even constitutive role of gaps in ocean data, and the existence of sciences and knowledges that are fundamentally incommensurable with One Ocean Science’s universalist ambitions.

The first of these sites, the technical rendering of the ocean, is perhaps the most recognizable to anyone following ocean science today. At the Nice meetings, the authors observed a strong propensity to present the ocean as a domain that can be fully mapped, measured, modeled, and monitored. New data technologies, including sensor networks, autonomous platforms, digital twins, and large-scale data integration efforts, promise what the researchers describe as “complete” ocean renderings, comprehensive digital portraits of the sea that ostensibly leave nothing out. The appeal is obvious: a fully quantified ocean seems to offer a neutral, objective basis for management and conservation decisions. But the researchers caution that this technical framing does political work. When the ocean is rendered primarily as a technical object, the political questions, who benefits from ocean resources, who bears the costs of conservation, whose voices shape governance, recede into the background, treated as settled or secondary to the business of data collection.

This is not an argument against data. The authors acknowledge the genuine scientific value of new observation technologies and the enormous effort behind them. Their point is subtler and more provocative: even the most ambitious data infrastructures embody choices about what to measure, how to categorize, and which questions matter. A “complete” ocean rendering is complete only relative to a particular framework of what counts as knowledge of the ocean. Frameworks are built by people, institutions, and funding structures, all of which carry histories, interests, and blind spots. Rendering the ocean technical, the researchers suggest, can obscure rather than resolve the politics woven through every dataset.

The second site of tension is the persistence of gaps. Ocean science has long been characterized by the fact that most of the ocean remains under-observed, under-sampled, or entirely unmeasured. The researchers found that gaps functioned as a defining feature of One Ocean Science at the Nice meetings, invoked repeatedly as a rationale for new expeditions, new funding, and new technologies. The gap talk is productive for science advocacy, precisely because it generates urgency. Yet the authors identify a deeper implication: gaps are not merely temporary deficits to be closed by better instrumentation. Some gaps reflect structural inequalities in the global scientific enterprise, including unequal access to research vessels, satellite data, computational capacity, and publication venues. A universalist science that treats all gaps as the same kind of problem risks overlooking the fact that some gaps are the direct product of historical and political asymmetries.

The third and arguably most challenging site concerns knowledges that simply cannot be rendered commensurable with One Ocean Science universalism. The ocean is known in many ways: by coastal communities whose intergenerational knowledge is embedded in practice and place, by fishers whose livelihoods depend on intimate familiarity with local waters, by Indigenous peoples for whom the ocean is woven into identity, law, and cosmology, and by formal disciplines from physical oceanography to marine ecology. The researchers observed that while the Nice meetings made space for difference rhetorically, celebrating inclusivity and pluralism, the underlying epistemological infrastructure of the events, the session formats, the data standards, the metrics of success, remained organized around a particular model of scientific knowledge. Knowledges that resist translation into that model, that cannot be converted into harmonized datasets or policy-ready indicators, remained marginal. Universalism, in other words, has edges, and the people and practices that fall outside them are not accidental casualties but structural features of how One Ocean Science operates.

Here the paper delivers its most counterintuitive claim. The researchers argue that One Ocean Science universalism is not undermined by difference; it is constituted through it. The very coherence of the “one ocean” narrative depends on heterogeneous scientific practices, diverse political interests, and uneven capacities being brought together, translated, and synchronized. Universalism is not a description of a pre-existing unity but an achievement, continuously produced through work that manages, absorbs, or excludes difference. This insight reframes the challenge of equitable ocean science. The task is not to eliminate difference in the name of unity, nor to reject universal science, but to hold space for difference within One Ocean, allowing plurality to shape the scientific enterprise rather than treating it as residue to be cleaned up.

The practical implications are significant. The authors argue that manifesting the goals of the UN Decade of Ocean Science, particularly the commitments to equity and sustainability, will require interrogating and redesigning what they call the epistemological infrastructure of One Ocean Science. That phrase encompasses the conventions, standards, platforms, and institutional routines through which ocean knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated. Designing pluralism into that infrastructure, making it structural rather than residual, could mean rethinking data governance so that community-held knowledge is protected rather than extracted, restructuring conference and decision-making formats so that non-dominant knowledge holders are participants rather than guests, and building evaluation criteria that recognize multiple forms of rigor and relevance.

The research also speaks to a broader conversation in science and technology studies about the politics of knowledge production in global environmental governance. Ocean governance is entering a decisive period, with a new international treaty on marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction moving toward implementation, deep-sea mining debates intensifying, and climate change reshaping ocean chemistry and circulation at pace. In this context, questions about whose knowledge informs governance are not academic. Decisions made on the basis of particular knowledge frameworks will distribute benefits and burdens across nations, communities, and generations. The researchers’ analysis suggests that acknowledging the politics of knowledge is not an obstacle to effective ocean governance but a precondition for legitimate and durable outcomes.

The team behind the paper is notably international and interdisciplinary, spanning geography departments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Guelph, Durham University, and Université Côte d’Azur, along with institutions including KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the Helmholtz Institute for Functional Marine Biodiversity at the University of Oldenburg, the Alfred Wegener Institute, the Duke University Marine Lab, and the University of Vienna. The work was supported by funders including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Helmholtz Association, the French CNRS, and the European Research Council, none of which, the authors note, played a role in study design or interpretation. Corresponding author Oscar Hartman Davies and his colleagues conducted their fieldwork amid the bustle of conference halls and negotiation rooms, capturing a moment when the world’s ocean community assembled around a shared banner and, in doing so, revealed the seams beneath it.

The message the researchers hope will travel beyond Nice is ultimately constructive. One Ocean Science has achieved remarkable things, mobilizing resources, attention, and cooperation on a planetary scale. But if the Decade of Ocean Science is to deliver science that is genuinely equitable and sustainable, the ocean community must make room for the many knowledges of the ocean, not as decorative additions to a universal edifice, but as constitutive parts of it. The one ocean, the authors remind us, has always been known in many ways. The future of ocean science depends on whether its institutions are willing to know that too.