Manifesto for the marine social sciences

There are manifestos, or public declarations, of many kinds. The current Manifesto of the Marine Social Sciences that emerged from the MARE 2019 Conference has a limited purview. Its audience is the epistemic community of marine social scientists, understood as the collection of scholars that is engaged with the understanding of people’s relation with the coastal and marine environment. Within this circumscribed yet still colossal realm, it strives to identify the topics that are most relevant to social scientists today. While the MARE network derives originally from the field of fisheries studies, the present Manifesto takes a broader perspective on the marine and coastal realm and is largely crowd-sourced (see below for a description of the process). Although the points it makes are not referenced, they are drawn from a significant fount of social scientific activity. They can of course be argued about—in fact, this may actually be their purpose. After all, the social sciences, other than the natural sciences that, in an Aristotelian perspective, aim to realize universal truth (episteme), are better in contributing phronesis: “practical wisdom on how to address and act on social problems in a particular context” (Flyvbjerg et al. 2012 :1). Such ‘wisdom’ is to be debated again and again, and yet again. In order to stimulate such debate, the organizers invited twelve scholars (or teams of scholars) to comment on the Manifesto’s content, specifying a variety of angles. These range from the local to the international, the practical to the theoretical, as well as the topical and sectoral. The commentaries follow the Manifesto text.