How Do Grand Challenges Travel Between Organizations? A Case Study On The Protection Of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems

Following the United Nations SDGs, numerous and heterogeneous strands of research increasingly refer to grand challenges such as climate change, which are characterized by being evaluative, complex and uncertain and therefore very different from other “normal” organizational and social issues. For around 10 years, Organization Studies in particular has been studying the role organizations play in tackling these grand challenges. However, relatively little is known about how these grand challenges are discursively interpreted as grand challenges in the first place, how they change as they travel from organization to organization and what translation processes they are subject to.

In my presentation, I examine a specific grand challenge – namely the protection of Vulnerable Marine Ecosystems (VMEs). VMEs are areas in the deep-sea (i.e. below 200m) where certain species like cold-water corals, deep-sea sponges, or sea pens live. These are highly vulnerable to human activity, and especially bottom-contact fishing. The realization that they are worth protecting in the interests of the sustainability of marine life began at the start of the millennium.

The question at this point is: how is such a grand challenge made actionable? In answering this question, I will trace very different process steps – starting with the events and findings against which the VMEs entered the UNGA stage in the beginning of the millennium, through a series of closures to the controversies that these decisions have sparked.

Both different actors and different translation processes play a role here. Not only intergovernmental organizations such as the UN, the FAO, intergovernmental science organizations (e.g., ICES) and Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (e.g., NAFO and NEAFC) are key in these processes. ENGOs such as the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) and industry associations such as the European Bottom Fisheries Alliance (EBFA) have also shaped their evolution. The translation processes range from the identification and formulation of the grand challenge to the production of knowledge to overcome it, the provision of a technical infrastructure to regularly and routinely survey the development of the grand challenge, to decision-making on the right measures and reactions that may then call the decisions made into question.

On the basis of qualitative interviews with representatives of organizations involved in these translation processes, I work out how an abstract grand challenge becomes an actionable grand challenge through translation processes within and between organizations, technical infrastructure and social debates – and what challenges arise in these processes. A grand challenge would not be a grand challenge if it were possible to simply string such processes together in a linear fashion, solve the individual sub-processes and then, like a computer program, come up with a perfectly tailored solution to the problem at the end. It is precisely this kind of linearity that grand challenges are opposed to.