The problem the Motion addresses is structural. In the United Kingdom, local governments typically have administrative powers that stop at mean low water, and many do not even own the foreshore. Marine decision-making has long been dominated by national and international bodies, leaving councils—the tier of government closest to citizens—largely absent from ocean policy. Yet marine citizenship research identifies that local scale decision-making is more accessible, transparent, and trusted than governance at other scales. This mismatch between where ocean decisions are made and where citizens engage with them creates what researchers call an implementation gap, and it was precisely this gap that Buchan, who was elected as a councillor during her PhD, experienced from both sides of the science-policy boundary.

The Motion for the Ocean was conceived in 2020 as a deliberate attempt to replicate the international success of climate emergency declarations, but with an ocean focus that was then missing from most climate policy. At the time, there was little political recognition that successful climate mitigation requires ocean action. A motion, in political terms, is a tool through which a new commitment is proposed, debated, and voted upon by a council. The first model Motion was drafted in 2021 with three components: background context linking ocean recovery to ocean-climate action ahead of the UN climate conference COP26; a set of council pledges grounded in marine citizenship research, designed to embed ocean recovery into core decision-making and budgeting; and a set of national policy asks to be sent from the council to national government, informed by further marine science.

Buchan proposed the first Motion to Plymouth City Council, which passed in November 2021, helping to embed marine citizenship as a core principle of the Plymouth Sound National Marine Park. Adapted versions were subsequently co-developed for inland councils and for the devolved nations of Wales and Scotland. Of the 40 councils that have now passed the declaration, nine are inland—a paradigm shift in where ocean responsibility is understood to lie, demonstrating that marine citizenship does not require ocean proximity. The approach from Blandford Forum, a smaller inland town council, led to the co-development of an inland version of the model Motion emphasizing source-to-sea thinking, since its administrative area has no coastline at all.

The initiative has achieved international recognition that few place-based governance experiments ever reach. It was presented at the 2024 UN Ocean Decade Conference, featured in the 2024 European Week of Regions and Cities round table on strengthening blue citizenship, and cited as a case study of good practice in a High-Level Ocean Panel paper on blue health as well as in the leading Oceans and Human Health textbook. Wales has become the first UK nation to adopt an ocean literacy strategy, Y Môr a Ni, with Monmouthshire County Council—the first in Wales to pass the Motion—having developed an action plan focused on driving behavior change. The Ocean and Society Survey, which gathered 8,440 responses, found that 80 percent of respondents consider marine protection crucial, providing a public mandate for the councils that declare.

What the case study makes unusually visible is the cost of this success in human effort. The authors estimate that the voluntary, in-kind time commitment behind the Motion amounts to around 200 days over four years—unfunded labor contributed by the researchers, by the Local Government Association Coastal Special Interest Group, and by the Ocean Conservation Trust. The Coastal SIG hosts documents and declarations on its websites, updates its 58 member councils quarterly, and has raised the Motion’s profile through national conference presentations. The Ocean Conservation Trust manages the public interface, encouraging people to write to their local councillor asking them to propose the Motion. At least six declarations arose directly from marine citizen contact, and thousands of people have interacted with the Motion through the engagement program at the National Marine Aquarium.

A core principle of the engagement has been to remain apolitical, and this has proven decisive. Politicians from across the political spectrum have proposed and supported local Motions, and the authors have strived to avoid the trap of politicized environmentalism. Because the marine citizenship origin of the Motion sees people as part of the marine environment rather than excluded from it, sustainable marine business and development sectors are treated as necessary partners alongside conservation. Partnerships with organizations such as Healthcare Ocean and the British Sub-Aqua Club, the UK’s governing body for scuba diving, whose members’ toolkit has led to at least two declarations, have extended the Motion’s reach into unexpected constituencies.

The authors analyze the Motion through four models of research-policy relations: knowledge shaping policy, politics shaping knowledge, co-production of knowledge and governance, and science and policy as autonomous systems. The case study illustrates that effective impact involves all of these at once. The Motion is founded on evidence-based content; local declarations are politically negotiated, with wording sometimes revised in response to amendments at council meetings—Monmouthshire was the first to amend its Motion to include rivers; iterative co-production makes the model responsive to policy shifts; and uptake is shaped by the differing institutional logics of research and council politics. The model Motion undergoes regular revision to reflect political, socio-economic, and ecological changes, operating as a dynamic, living knowledge exchange mechanism rather than a static template.

The gap between local government and marine policy is not unique to the UK. Even in the European Union, where marine spatial planning policy and a history of Integrated Coastal Zone Management exist, the gap remains evident, and researchers have called for more meaningful local government engagement in marine planning. The authors argue that while the specific wording of the model Motion is unlikely to transfer directly to other national policy contexts, the principles and practice of research-policy relations documented in the case study can facilitate the co-creation of locally relevant political mechanisms elsewhere. Transnational municipal networks connecting cities in climate action are structurally well placed to champion the Motion internationally, though low political ocean literacy persists as a barrier.

The reflections that close the case study are pointed. The authors note that promoting system change requires system change itself: councils must remodel their governance processes to deliver ocean recovery, yet chronic underfunding of local government, low ocean literacy, and the endemic undervaluing of the marine environment stand in the way. For academia, they ask how funding can be redesigned to provide the flexibility and longevity needed to sustain the relationships that underpin effective impact, and how career pathways can support boundary-spanning early-career researchers—people who have worked in multiple sectors and can translate between worlds. The Motion’s declarations, the authors emphasize, are starting points rather than endpoints. But the broader message is one of possibility: evidence-based transformation of ocean governance is achievable, and it can begin at any career stage, in any council chamber, with a single motion on the agenda.

Subject of Research: The Motion for the Ocean: scaling marine citizenship through local government declarations

Article Title: The Motion for the Ocean: scaling marine citizenship through local government declarations

Article References: Buchan, P. M., MacDonald-Lofts, R., Cunningham, E. G., Bridge, N., & Clifford, G. (2026). The Motion for the Ocean: scaling marine citizenship through local government declarations. Frontiers in Ocean Sustainability, 4, Article 1904467. https://doi.org/10.3389/focsu.2026.1904467

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/focsu.2026.1904467

Keywords: marine citizenship, ocean literacy, local government, ocean recovery, research impact, marine governance, Motion, Ocean, scaling, marine, citizenship, local