For the Love of the Sea: Technocratic Environmentalism and the Struggle to Sustain Community-Led Aquaculture

Gareth Thomas, Louise Steel () and Luci Attala
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Gareth Thomas: INSPIRE Hub, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, Technium 2, King’s Road, Swansea SA1 8PH, UK
Louise Steel: UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES UK Hub, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, College Road, Carmarthen SA31 3EP, UK
Luci Attala: UNESCO-MOST BRIDGES UK Hub, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, College Road, Carmarthen SA31 3EP, UK

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 22, 1-19

Abstract: This article argues that sustainability governance in small-scale regenerative aquaculture arises less from formal regulation than from the relational, ethical, and temporal labour of practitioners. Based on an ethnographic study of Câr-y-Môr, Wales’s first community-owned regenerative ocean farm, the research combines over 250 h of participant observation, 25 interviews, and document analysis with transdisciplinary humanities-informed sustainability science (THiSS). The study shows how technocratic environmentalism, reliant on auditing, reporting, and standardised procedures, often clashes with the shifting rhythms of tides, weather, and the embodied work of marine labour. Ethnography uniquely reveals the embodied knowledge, improvisation, and moral commitment through which practitioners continually remake governance, translating bureaucratic rules into ecologically and socially meaningful practice. The findings demonstrate that adaptive governance requires recognition of local and experiential expertise, proportionate regulatory frameworks, and protected spaces for experimentation and learning. Seen in this way, sustainability shifts from a fixed goal to a relational process. When governance learns from practice and care is recognised as a form of knowledge, it becomes more adaptive, situated, and responsive, revealing both the constraints of technocratic control and the possibilities of care-based policy and practice.

Keywords: aquaculture; regenerative ocean farming; embodied knowledge; technocratic environmentalism; participant observation; political ecology; transdisciplinarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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