The Co-Construction of Everything: The Case of a Collective Scientific Assessment on Deep Sea Knowledge and Governance in the Pacific

In the wake of the update of its deep-sea national strategy in 2020, the French government commissioned a collective scientific assessment on deep sea knowledge and governance issues (2022-2025) that is carried out by the French National Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD). This scientific assessment has two objectives. 

First, it aims to present an overview of (i) the different knowledge registers (scientific, professional, administrative, legal, indigenous knowledge) relating to the deep sea, (ii) current and potential/future uses of the deep sea and associated impacts, and (iii) governance arrangements of these spaces. In addition to these three thematic areas, cross-cutting questions focus on issues of ethics, risk and uncertainty in its different guises, temporalities (the pace of scientific knowledge production as well as the unfolding of deep sea uses and impacts), justice (including epistemic justice), and inequalities (e.g. the North/South divide between knowledge producers and users). 

The second objective is to produce a set of recommendations to inform national deep-sea policy. The aim of these recommendations is not to choose a substantive option (e.g. marine conservation vs. deep sea mineral exploitation), but to propose a procedural rationale for articulating a deep-sea policy framework.

The enactment of this three-year, multidisciplinary program (anthropology, philosophy, oceanography, biology, geology, economics) actually departs from its linear design as it revealed to be a permanent work of co-construction: of the demand (what are the government’s expectations if any?), the supply (compiling existing knowledge or producing new knowledge if only by linking different sources and registers of knowledge?), process monitoring (by negotiating the inclusion of French Pacific Overseas Territories’ representatives in the steering committee), its regional resonance (through the construction of two regional dialogue platforms). This constructivist perspective on the expertise process will enrich the reflection on the epistemological and political status of the kind of initiative aiming at strengthening science-policy-society interfaces.