For the love of the sea: technocratic environmentalism and the struggle to sustain community-led aquaculture

Thomas, Gareth and Steel, Louise and Attala, Luci (2025) For the love of the sea: technocratic environmentalism and the struggle to sustain community-led aquaculture. Sustainability, 17 (22). ISSN 2071-1050

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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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	aquaculture, regenerative ocean farming, embodied knowledge, technocratic environmentalism, participant observation, political ecology, transdisciplinarity
Subjects:	S Agriculture > SH Aquaculture. Fisheries. Angling
Divisions:	Institutes and Academies > Institute of Education and Humanities > Academic Discipline: Humanities and Social Sciences
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.3390/su172210136
Depositing User:	Natalie Williams
Date Deposited:	14 Nov 2025 09:59
Last Modified:	14 Nov 2025 09:59
URI:	https://repository.uwtsd.ac.uk/id/eprint/4001

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