Abstract
Diverse knowledge insights are essential to inform action on bringing about transformations in how societies live with changing Earth, ocean and coastal systems. However, knowledge forms typically used in governance systems are stubbornly limited. This paper analyses the extent to which an expanding ontology of the concept of ‘infrastructure’ can contribute to building more integrated knowledge for governance in ocean and coastal contexts. This paper asks: What can creative and critical engagement with infrastructure thinking offer to efforts to bring together diverse forms of knowledge and to develop more effective and ethical governance in changing coastal contexts? Employing a qualitative assessment of how the concept of infrastructure is defined in multiple disciplines and contexts, the paper identifies three heuristic types of structures, things and processes that can collectively inform interdisciplinary dialogue and governance dialogue: (i) built/physical infrastructure, (ii) environmental infrastructure, and (iii) societal/cultural infrastructure. Drawing on insights from critical infrastructure studies and more-than-human perspectives, the paper then identifies ontological and methodological challenges of integration, values, and power/agency for those who engage a multi-faceted conception of infrastructure to frame analysis and action. Bringing these insights together, the paper argues that infrastructure thinking provides a means to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue, and a useful lens with which to analytically integrate diverse forms of knowledge about/in ocean and coastal contexts. However, cautious and critical perspectives are needed to support efforts in (re)thinking and integrating for collective action and governance.
Introduction
The accelerating rate of change in Earth-Ocean systems is linked to an evolving “constellation of governance challenges,” including shifts in social, cultural, economic, technical and environmental systems that require diverse and linked knowledge to understand and address. 1 Challenges caused by environmental, climate and societal change are also experienced unevenly and intersectionally, as diverse pressures, impacts, and hazards—such as climate change, extreme weather, pollution, food insecurity, floods, draught and conflict—affect individuals, groups, peoples and communities in different ways. 2 Social-ecological and Earth systems research and policy have contributed to a paradigm shift towards integrative perspectives as efforts to overcome the constraining effects of disciplinary and knowledge fragmentation on effective governance intensify. 3 Governance tends to be informed by limited considerations of science and a limited range of knowledge forms. 4 Such a limited range of scientific input has largely failed to support transformative change and has alienated marginalised groups and communities through disenfranchising their input. If we are to successfully respond to current and future social-ecological threats, new approaches and innovative concepts to resolve the challenges of fragmented knowledge and governance are needed. 5
Attention to the concept of infrastructure (broadly defined) is a candidate for fresh interdisciplinary thinking and integrative insight for several reasons. First, redesigning built infrastructure is at the forefront of academic and policy discussions about causes and solutions to the biggest challenges facing society. For some analysts, transitioning to a low carbon economy to address climate change globally will potentially require more than nine trillion dollars in spending on built-physical infrastructure. 6 Secondly, to meet global goals for sustainable development and address climate change, other researchers have suggested that transformational perspectives and action on infrastructure are needed to build adaptive systems and resiliency to protect communities and ecosystems. 7 Thirdly, some assessments suggest enhancing the resilience of coastal infrastructure in the face of climate change will require a “whole of society” approach, demonstrating the demand for interdisciplinary thinking. 8 Fourth, prominent attempts to redesign global social policy are infused with infrastructure assumptions, ideas and expectations. 9 In this context, this paper asks: What can creative and critical engagement with infrastructure thinking offer to efforts to bring together diverse forms of knowledge and to develop more effective and ethical governance in changing coastal contexts?
This paper is structured as follows: In section two, we describe the main methods and approach taken. Section three describes how the concept of infrastructure has been used to conceptualise a diversity of fundamental systems and processes across multiple disciplines and diverse social-ecological domains. The analysis categorises uses and meanings of the term infrastructure into three relatively common and distinct types—built/physical, environmental and societal/cultural—and highlights their relevance for ocean and coastal contexts This categorisation constitutes a heuristic device to provide a relatively inclusive basis for informing interdisciplinary analysis, but current engagement with such distinctions and uses is often problematic and should be tempered with critically-informed, integrated analyses. Therefore, in section four, we draw on and contribute to critical infrastructure studies by questioning narrowly technocratic and instrumentalist understandings of infrastructure, and discussing an expanded ontology of infrastructure that is inclusive of more relational, integrated, and more-than-human relations and cohabitation principles. 10 Integrating insights from social-ecological systems thinking with more-than-human assemblage dynamics perspectives, 11 this paper provides examples of an expanded ontology of infrastructures in ocean and coastal contexts, consistent with the emerging field of interdisciplinary and critical ocean governance scholarship within the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021–2030). 12 We conclude that researchers and practitioners should critically and ethically approach infrastructure as an analytical method, including by considering thorny challenges associated with interdisciplinary integration, values, and agency/power if they use the term to inform discussion, planning, and policy. Based on the analysis, section five concludes that applying infrastructure thinking as a method should be done cautiously and with humility, as a means to respectfully wrestle with the role of infrastructures as fundamental life-changing social-ecological assemblages.
Research Approach
Infrastructure is a term most commonly used to refer to the so-called human-built environment. Roads, bridges, buildings, airports, and communications networks are commonly referred to as infrastructure. However, a brief search for the word in scholarly and public policy literature reveals it is also used to mean other things and processes, reflecting a degree of conceptual malleability and ontological vagueness. Even in the literature on green urban infrastructure planning where it is perhaps most commonly invoked, the concept remains broad and elusive, with a need for clarity in operationalisation. 13 Conceptual difference and drift across disciplines, however, raises the question of the potential for infrastructure thinking, once more effectively and critically defined, to provide a means for building interdisciplinary knowledge in support of understanding, planning and governance. To better understand the extent to which the concept of infrastructure can contribute to interdisciplinarity and to effective governance, we conducted a literature review using multiple search engines to identify distinct and common uses of the term. These searches located engagement with the term across diverse fields such as engineering and public works, computer science, biological, ecological and environmental sciences, economics, anthropology, sociology, architecture, political science, and hydrology. Rather than conduct a systematic review, however, the purpose of this approach was to qualitatively identify common patterns of distinct uses.
The review identified three common and distinct uses and meanings of infrastructure. In section three below, we discuss each category of use and meaning in turn and provide specific examples from ocean and coastal contexts, demonstrating the methodological potential for infrastructure thinking as a means to interdisciplinary governance dialogue in these contexts. At the same time, the literature review identified insights from the field of critical infrastructure studies—which engages ethnography, science and technology studies (STS), political ecology, postcolonial studies, media studies, digital humanities, waste and discard studies, literary theory, and the arts—that emphasise more relational and integrated understandings of each type of infrastructure. 14 Insights from some of these contributions suggest that researchers should not uncritically accept either the common conceptual distinction between the three infrastructure types explained below, or the distinction between human and non-human categories. Researchers should instead respect an ontology of more-than-human – “an increasingly recognized term that aims to emphasize capabilities and actions of all agents, without privileging humans”. 15 In a context of increasing calls to challenge anthropocentricism in infrastructure studies and broader interdisciplinary calls for more-than-human assemblage dynamics, this paper contributes to efforts to cope with current and future governance challenges by engaging an expanded ontology of infrastructure that aims to help critique, inform and inspire new narratives and approaches for forward-looking action in ocean and coastal research and governance.
Infrastructure Types
Built/Physical Infrastructures
Examples of ocean and coastal built-physical infrastructure.
Environmental Infrastructures
From quite different perspectives, other researchers and practitioners use the concept of infrastructure to refer to environmental structures and processes that support life. 21 Since the 1980s, for example, scientists and conservationists have suggested that ecosystems should be considered as a type of infrastructure, with terms such as ecosystems, ecological, natural, green, and blue often used in front of the word infrastructure. 22 From this general perspective, “[e]cological infrastructure refers to naturally functioning ecosystems that deliver valuable services to people, such as fresh water, climate regulation, soil formation and disaster risk reduction. It is the nature-based equivalent of built or hard infrastructure, and is just as important for providing services and underpinning socio-economic development”. 23 The concept green infrastructure is sometimes used to refer to the integration of environmental and semi-environmental forms of infrastructure, with some including designed and strategically planned forms of physical infrastructure. Green infrastructure is thus often defined as a network of natural, semi-natural and restored areas designed and managed to enable societal adaptation to change and to deliver societal benefits. 24 In these views, infrastructure is often explicitly linked and compared to built/physical infrastructure, and intentionally conceptualised as a separate but equivalent form. As Barua states, “Infrastructures become a medium of life as natural and infrastructural ecologies meld, reorienting notions of design, architecture, planning and governance…non-human life itself can be cast as infrastructure” (2021, 1467).
Examples of ocean and coastal environmental infrastructures.
Societal/Cultural Infrastructures
Other theorists and researchers use the concept of infrastructure to refer to patterns of human collective action or what social scientists call social structures, including interrelated social, economic, cultural, and institutional structures. 32 Within that literature there appears to be two distinct sub-uses of the concept. In one use, “[s]ocial infrastructure can be broadly categorised as: health; individual, family, and community support; education; arts and culture; information; sport and recreation; housing; community development; employment and training; legal and public safety; emergency services; public and community transport”. 33 Some of these meanings correspond to what is popularly understood as social service infrastructure in the context of national and subnational welfare state systems. A second use refers to societal structures more broadly and immaterially in a social/cultural sense of enduring and dynamic societal structures, interactions, relationships and even norms and ideas. Examples include institutional infrastructures, 34 global infrastructures of economic production and consumption, 35 culture and cultural landscapes, 36 knowledge, 37 and art. 38 From this perspective, societal infrastructure can be understood as “the roots of human sociality…that supports the overall or macro-structure of societies in the same sense that roads and railways serve as infrastructure for the economy”. 39
Ocean and coastal societal/cultural infrastructure examples.
Summary
An infrastructure lens, with the diversity discussed above at the forefront, can provide a means to analytically deconstruct and reconstruct different coastal infrastructures and support communication across knowledge and policy fields. Considering these infrastructures as systems and processes that are normally designed to sustain or enhance life allows disparate considerations to be considered as part of a more holistic perspective. This kind of an approach can allow purposeful governance actions across a broad range of areas of life supports, needs and risks for coastal life, providing an interdisciplinary means to identify and address diverse ocean and coastal governance problems and opportunities in addressing challenges such as sustainable development and climate change. However, it is important not to reify the three main types of infrastructure as always distinct and to recognise how the anthropocentrism inherent in common uses of the term infrastructure generate failures and raise important questions about future engagement with the concept of infrastructure. Drawing on critical infrastructure studies, the next section identifies some challenges and insights for future engagement with infrastructure thinking in coastal and ocean contexts.
Infrastructure Assemblages, Values and Agency
Towards Critical Coastal infrastructure Studies
As illustrated above, the concept of infrastructure has wide appeal and can be used across diverse disciplines and domains of study in ocean and coastal contexts. The scholarly and policy attention to three separate types of infrastructure illustrate the potential for infrastructure thinking as a means for enhancing disciplinary contributions and integrated research agendas. Understanding multiple uses and meanings of infrastructure provides one way to help address problems of knowledge fragmentation and to bring more diverse perspectives together to inform ocean and coastal research and governance. However, identifying discrete infrastructures can actually reproduce fragmented understandings of problems. From a critical perspective, use of the term infrastructure across distinct disciplines points to both the “diversity of ways to conceive of and analyze infrastructures…[and]… to the productive instability of the basic unit of research. 44 While the tripartite distinction identified above can be useful for heuristic and analytical purposes to support interdisciplinary dialogue, analysing one type of infrastructure in isolation from others has ontological and ethical limitations.
Critical infrastructure studies help address this issue by expanding the ontology of the concept. It does so by facilitating analysis of deep interactions and relations among infrastructure types so as to show their co-constitution, by drawing attention to the anthropocentric nature of mainstream infrastructure studies, and by pointing to the value of more-than human perspectives. One of the most important contributions from critical infrastructure studies is the conceptualisation of physical-built infrastructures in relational terms. 45 Geographers, anthropologists, landscape architects and planners have turned to this material-centric understanding of infrastructure in contemporary disciplinary re-orientations and re-visioning. 46 They point out that physical-built infrastructures are not just discrete, inert technical systems of connectivity, but also enable and constrain access and connectivity based on class, race, gender and citizenship relations and structures, 47 or infrastructures. From this perspective, infrastructures actually “infiltrate instead of underlie” in that they “provide life to the structures they infiltrate and perfuse. 48 Referring to the importance of knowledge in relational terms can highlight the links between and mutual constitution of different forms of infrastructure and the power relations inherent in infrastructure relations. Métis scholar Murphy observes, for example, that “infrastructure underlines the ways knowledge-making can install material supports into the world—such as buildings, bureaucracies, standards, forms, technologies, funding flows, affective orientations, and power relations” (2017). In this context, “uneven relations and infrastructure […] shape what forms of life are supported to persist, thrive, and alter, and what forms of life are destroyed, injured, and constrained”. 49
The expanded ontology of infrastructure must also contend with insights from more-than-human perspectives. A key insight of the expanded ontology of infrastructure to include environmental infrastructures is that human well-being arguably depends not only on physical-built infrastructures like roads and ports and on immaterial societal infrastructures but also natural/environmental infrastructures. 50 Yet even the classics of critical infrastructures that recognise environmental infrastructure have arguably continued the anthropocentricism of non-social scientific understanding of infrastructure by instrumentally privileging human well-being and benefits. 51 For this reason, greater attention to a wider ontology of infrastructure with a view to “the more-than-human” concerns 52 and wet ontologies that characterise the materiality, motion and temporality of ocean and coastal infrastructure 53 should be recognised. We reflect further below on the implications of critical perspectives on infrastructures for coastal studies, specifically around three challenges: the co-constitution of infrastructures or infrastructure assemblages, values, and power/agency.
Infrastructure Assemblages
The co-constitution of infrastructures can be illustrated with examples of (i) seafood supply chains, (ii) coastal governance, and (iii) infrastructure failure. Seafood supply chains constitute a social-ecological infrastructure assemblage comprised of only relatively distinct environmental, physical-built and societal/cultural infrastructures that collectively organise productive, economic and social/cultural relations between multiple agents and with multiple purposes and drivers from human consumption to supporting coastal community employment and livelihoods to capital accumulation, colonialism, patriarchy and speciesism. 54 As Martin et al. put it in the context of farmed salmon, “[t]he ecologies that support both the containment and the feeding of salmon are not separate from the infrastructure for conventional salmon production: Nature despite (or through) its enclosure and manipulation is integral, usefully understood as an ‘ecological infrastructure”. 55 Seafood supply chains develop in accordance with the dynamics of diverse social-ecological infrastructure assemblages, each with their own history within which living wild marine and farmed species are accessed and “infrastructured” 56 using intersecting built-physical infrastructures that are shaped in turn by societal and cultural infrastructures. Collectively, these intersect across variable stages of production and circulation of seafood and seafood products including: harvest, landing, processing, storage, transportation, trade and consumption. Along the way, these products and human and non-human agents undergo transformations.
Coastal governance also constitutes a social-ecological infrastructure assemblage deeply intertwined with multiple forms of infrastructure. Working with the notion of understanding, transforming and designing governance infrastructure can be daunting because of dynamic more-than-human complexity of social-ecological infrastructure assemblages and the ongoing calls for transformational change that involve creating new processes, with different components, relationships, interactions, and feedback. 57 Inconsistencies in sectoral approaches (e.g. fisheries, aquaculture, marine shipping, offshore wind energy, recreation), multiple jurisdictions with overlapping and conflicting mandates, conflicts between actors, and poor communication among governance institutions create further challenges. 58 This is why some researchers propose a focus on developing interactive governance approaches based on more flexible, adaptive, inclusive institutions that feature shared forms of decision-making and learning, including social-ecological system co-management. 59 Since the scale and scope of any infrastructure system will likely be distributed across organisational and jurisdictional units, an infrastructure lens could respond to a need for collaborative design tools to exchange information among decision makers. 60 These design tools could include assessment and appraisal systems that account for diverse, including more-than-human, infrastructure elements; 61 and future scenario-building and foresighting that puts diverse and mutually constitutive infrastructures at the centre of long-term planning in coastal situations. 62 While understanding governance as infrastructure is not often explicit, similar literatures on governance as architecture also raise questions about ways such concepts can risk locking in prevailing power relations and inequities. 63
Understanding the relations between types of infrastructure is important for identifying infrastructural problems and failures. For instance, examinations of the relationship between long-term infrastructure development to colonial development illustrates the importance of questioning the often-asserted emancipatory potential of infrastructure. 64 Within ocean and coastal systems, distinct and intersecting physical-built infrastructures often interact with two other types of infrastructures identified in Table 1, but some infrastructures tend to be prioritised over others. Dykes, for example, are one form of built infrastructure designed to both protect coastal communities against the sea, including sea level change, and support communities in living with water. 65 These built infrastructures are vulnerable to aging and climate change 66 Dykes, however, can have unintended consequences for infrastructures of coastal habitats 67 and can “create long-term lock-in of vulnerability, exposure and risks that are difficult and costly to change”. 68 Another case of physical-built infrastructure failure linked to the inability or refusal to recognise the value and agency of natural infrastructure is that of cypress trees in the creation of the port of New Orleans: natural infrastructures of the Mississippi River, bald cypress trees and Lake Pontchartrain allowed the creation of the colonial coastal port of New Orleans, which linked early America’s interior to the ocean and international trade destinations. 69 However, the creation of a shipping channel through cypress swamps created conditions enabling more coastal destruction during hurricane Katrina. 70
These examples demonstrate how an expanded infrastructure lens can serve as a larger contemporary methodology for understanding diverse ocean and coastal contexts and relations. Such a methodology could be applied to better understand inherited and intertwined infrastructure assemblages of coastal habitation (human and more-than-human forms), settlement, trade, conflict, technology, livelihood, health, education, recreation, architecture, art, gender, class and other relations, cultural practices and governance and to envision their futures in place and in policy.
Infrastructure Values
Infrastructures obstruct, contain, carry, and communicate different, sometimes competing values, norms and worldviews. In conventional understandings of infrastructure, value is often ascribed in an instrumental and functionalist way, with a focus on particular notions of human benefit. In urban contexts, for instance, ecological infrastructure is typically defined as “any piece of nature that provides important benefits to those in a city”. 71 For Globerman and Shapiro, a “positive” political infrastructure would include an effective, impartial, and transparent legal system that protects property and individual rights; public institutions that are stable, credible and honest; and government policies that favour free and open markets. 72 While such liberal conceptions of governance reflect prevailing societal norms and power relations, other perspectives go beyond the interpretation of form and meaning and attempt to understand the evolution/direction of particular artifact systems such as infrastructures over time in relation to values. 73 Critical infrastructure studies also tells us that even material infrastructures are fundamentally defined by social and cultural relations and values.
Understanding the relational dimensions of infrastructure highlights the potential emergence of effects in wider and often contested economic, cultural, social, and political contexts. 74 Relational perspectives on built/physical infrastructures go beyond viewing infrastructure projects in terms of their technological, economic and public functions to highlight how they are designed and constructed in relation to specific “ethical regimes and political projects”, 75 as well as political economic regimes at the nature/value nexus. 14 These critical perspectives allow us to think of ocean and coastal infrastructure as not only an object of analysis, but also as politics that may be linked to but not always reducible to frameworks of nation states or capitalist development. 76
It is important to recognise that many infrastructures are problematic not only in terms of their actual environmental and social and economic effectiveness, but are also linked to exploitative, exclusionary and anthropocentric perspectives. 77 In Southern megacities such as Manila, for example, coastal protection and infrastructure-led adaptation is heavily oriented towards building spaces for upper and middle classes, demonstrating how political, classed rhetoric about natural hazards can be used to justify particular political agendas. 78 The contested uses of urban coastlines illustrate the importance of asking: what and who are infrastructures for, and what are they designed to achieve? This points to the importance of situating the development and effects of infrastructure assemblages within wider and often immaterial social and political contexts, locally, regionally and beyond, that shape infrastructure design, use and consequences.
As such, moving beyond anthropocentric perspectives on infrastructure is a key challenge. Adopting a more-than-human perspective can advance debates on infrastructural justice, 79 challenge anthropocentric and utilitarian assumptions and better integrate relationality and ethics, including consideration of more-than-human agency and concerns. In many coastal villages of Newfoundland, Canada, for example, marine life, vernacular architecture, edible cultural landscapes and ethics of care, reciprocity and sustainability are all easily understood as mutually necessary to support life and livelihoods 80 but cannot be understood independently of historical and contemporary regional, national and international social-ecological infrastructures. As Mellin shows in a study of more-than-human elements of architecture in a settler fishing village in Newfoundland, “[s]tructural engineers may be alarmed by some of the casual foundation details encountered … [However,] the precarious balancing of stones and a few wooden shores with no tie-downs provides a miracle of support in hurricane-force winds and high tides”. 81 While such infrastructures are also under considerable strain, are not immune from collapse, and require regular maintenance, such examples provide insight into how vernacular knowledge and custom can respect, value and work with more-than human forms of infrastructure. 82
Persistent, changing and competing values will have a significant impact on the long-term trajectory and possibilities for coastal infrastructure governance into the future. As Escobar observes in relation to values embedded in alternative design theories, “much of what goes on under the guise of design at present involves intensive resource use and vast material destruction … [and that] … design is central to the structures of unsustainability that hold in place the contemporary, so-called modern world”. 83 While value theories are numerous, design theory takes context (in its broadest senses) and responsibility seriously in design. 84 Such perspectives can be considered to make points of discourse and value explicit, a politico-ontological pre-condition to elevating principles of transparency and responsibility in infrastructure conceptualisation, design and development. Indeed, a transformation in the way that infrastructure values are understood and measured is needed to meet long-term sustainability goals. 85 We thus need better recognition of the diversity of (sometimes competing) governance values and the interdependencies between different values in infrastructure uses and meanings in ocean and coastal contexts.
Infrastructural Agency
It is important to analyse governance infrastructure and agency together, 86 perhaps particularly in coastal contexts. The creation of built/physical infrastructures such as a fishing wharf is usually driven by clear agents who have a single goal with a technical outcome that is relatively clear and achievable, and often time-limited. However, in social and biological systems, such as municipal planning and harbour habitats, infrastructure development occurs over longer time horizons, often in an evolutionary, iterative way. Thinking about designing and building ocean and coastal governance systems is fundamentally different than designing or building physical-built port systems. An analysis by Schmidt and Hauch for example, reveals varying local perceptions of the benefits and limitations of hybrid environmental infrastructure, with locals disagreeing on who should maintain it, whether through compensation or trained personnel. A major contention is whether environmental infrastructure provides habitat for beneficial species or harmful pests. The study concludes that environmental infrastructure should be viewed as long-term infrastructure, requiring coordination and cooperation, with measures tailored to local and regional needs. 87 Just as analysing and building governance architectures risks locking in existing power relations and inequities, 88 infrastructure analyses and engagements can also simply reinforce values and power structures that advantage certain human and more-than-human agents and disadvantage others. Misapplying the infrastructure metaphor can therefore mask the importance and limits of infrastructural agency in influencing support for and consequences of infrastructure across types and into the future.
A richer, critical discussion on infrastructure design is needed to inform ocean and coastal governance. Complex analyses of infrastructure failures, such as overfishing and offshore oil rig disasters, for example, that encompass human-built physical, environmental and societal dimensions are needed to identify origins and opportunities for more effective agency in infrastructure change and design into the future. 89 Furthermore, re-thinking infrastructure likely requires a shift away from rationalist worldviews, philosophies and cultures that have underpinned particular ways of thinking and being among people and designers. 90 Indeed, alternative ontologies and rationalities would likely be informative to exploring alternative governance principles, designs and institutional pathways. The concept of universal design, for example, spans diverse academic traditions such as architecture, planning, law, ethics, public health, and rehabilitation 91 and, while definitions vary, shares the goal of making our human-made spaces and infrastructures as accessible and usable as possible for as diverse a user population as possible. 92 Frameworks that prioritise inclusion of local language, Indigenous knowledge and creative stories informing design and decisions in responding to the climate change crisis around the world will be critical for respecting agents other than those in positions of substantial power. 93 This is one of the greatest challenges for infrastructure as a method for interdisciplinary knowledge mobilisation to inform governance in changing ocean and coastal contexts.
Practical methodologies are also needed that can put into practice more-than human approaches and agency within infrastructure design and development. Who gets to speak for and represent infrastructure relations and design values, especially in more-than-human matters, is thus an important methodological and governance challenge. In the context of waterfront infrastructures, for example, “Accounting for nature as an active agent—earthquakes, gribbles, tidal activity—highlights significant components of what is brought together, made more coherent, and assembled into visions of waterfront infrastructures ‘for all’. 94 A major practical challenge is the complexity of putting in place participatory methods and forms of mediation that identify and express needs and desires of agents other than those that are narrowly human. 95 Such methodologies could draw inspiration from experiments in environmental planning, though will involve thorny challenges of ethical judgement and responsibility. 96
Conclusion
Growing attention to addressing knowledge fragmentation is reflected in the paradigm shift towards integrative perspectives in social-ecological and Earth-Ocean systems research and policy. 97 Poor integration of knowledge and insufficient ocean literacy are among the many barriers to developing policy tools for sustainability and transformative action in the area of ocean governance. 98 This paper highlights infrastructure as a useful lens to facilitate and build such interdisciplinary integration. The analysis above provides insight into the potential for, and challenges of, using infrastructure as a means and metaphor for interdisciplinary dialogue to inform ocean and coastal research and governance, particularly in the face of complex, rapid and volatile change—noting that this use of metaphors to enhance understanding and to influence public perceptions calls for “strict examination”. 99
This paper identifies three distinct uses and meanings of the term in existing literature that can inform interdisciplinary dialogue and discusses how critical infrastructure studies is needed to both expand and challenge infrastructure ontologies further. In this context, the analysis makes three broader contributions. First, it contributes to efforts to build pluralistic, vibrant and relevant research on ways to cope with and govern change and transitions. 100 For example, the concept of infrastructure can provide an interdisciplinary lens and discourse to help inform new narratives, new thinking and new approaches required to inspire forward-looking action in coastal governance. 101 Second, it contributes to ongoing work articulating an expanded ontology of infrastructure in response to calls for deeper understandings of the relationship between concepts of infrastructures, ecologies and sustainability. 102 The familiarity and widespread use of the concept of infrastructure in public policy and science, from local (e.g., municipal) to global (e.g., United Nations) levels, enhances its potential to contribute to post-normal science. 103
Third, it offers an innovative and collaborative framing for researchers to use, build upon and critically engage. For researchers and practitioners of ocean and coastal studies, future research questions might include: what types of infrastructures are present and identifiable in/as social-ecological assemblages in and across ocean and coastal spaces? What relations characterise those types of infrastructures? Whose values and agency are reflected in their emergence and development? Future-oriented studies might include: what types of infrastructures and infrastructure relationships are possible and preferable for coastal areas and communities into the future? What infrastructure assemblages, values and agents are needed to achieve societal goals like sustainable development, democracy, equity, and decolonisation? And what actions are required to avoid supporting, designing and building the wrong infrastructure in the context of climate and social change?
Infrastructure is far from neutral; it can destroy as well as support life. As a thing and as a concept, infrastructure can reinforce and challenge prevailing values and power structures – which we suggest is a strength. Infrastructure is ultimately contested and unsettled in theory and in practice, but as a dynamic interdisciplinary discourse and method of analysis it can help in supporting collaborative global efforts to organise, imagine, plan, and create future governance dialogues, designs and relationships for some of the most pressing issues facing the planet in the twenty-first century.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (20200928 and Ocean Frontier Institute).
Notes
Author Biographies