Webinar Blue Justice #9 with Pr Marie-Catherine Riekhof, Kiel University

Blue Justice Webinar - SEries of QUestions on Equity at sea
More information : https://www.umr-amure.fr/recherche/ax...
#9
By Marie-Catherine Riekhof, Professor for Political Economy for Resource Management with a focus on marine and coastal resources at Kiel University. She is also the director of the Center for Ocean and Society.

"Nature’s decline and recovery — Structural change, regulatory costs, and the onset of resource use regulation"

Many renewable natural resources have been extracted beyond sustainable levels. While some resource stocks have recovered, others are still over-extracted, causing substantial economic losses. This paper develops a model motivated by empirical facts about resource use and regulation to understand these patterns. The model is a dynamic model of a dual economy with technological progress, structural change, and costly resource regulation. Based on this model, we show that technological progress explains the initial increase in resource use. Technological progress also induces structural change and a decline in resource users. While the declining number of resource users does not directly lead to resource recovery, it does reduce regulatory costs, paving the way for resource regulation and recovery. Our results show that although technological progress can contribute to resource degradation, it also helps resource recovery through reduced regulatory costs. Our results suggest further that a temporal use beyond sustainable levels can be socially optimal until regulatory costs fall below the benefits of regulation. As part of the seminar, we will also discuss justice related questions.

Blue Justice webinar series / SEries of QUestions on Equity at sea
As a provider of energy, goods and services, and a vector for trade, the ocean is already an essential component of global economic development, and this is expected to increase in the coming decades. This growth of the so-called “blue economy” is associated with the generation of wealth and employment, and changes in ways of life for coastal and maritime people and communities. It also comes with multiple claims on the ocean for food, material and space, and with a growing human footprint and degradation regarding the functioning of marine ecosystems and the contributions to people they support. The ocean is mainly seen as a commodity in the perspective of the “blue economy”, underlining developments since the enlightenment that consider human beings and the (marine) environment as separate entities. These developments raise the questions of how we want to shape or change our human-ocean relations in times of socio-ecological crisis, and address issues of access regulations and liability, as part of policies designed to ensure the sustainability of the blue economy, within and across multiple sectors. A key question in thinking about such regulations is that of equity considerations, and how these can affect the capacity for long-term collective management arrangements and the ocean as common good to be sustained. There is a long research tradition on these questions in the social sciences, which can help inform current debates on how such considerations can best be addressed.
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The Blue Justice webinar series aims to establish a scientific forum to present and debate disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and empirical case studies regarding equity at sea. Scholars from a wide range of perspectives in the social sciences are invited to present work ranging from the review or development of conceptual work to applied research, in short (maximum 25mn) presentations, that are followed by a moderated discussion, the total duration of each webinar being limited to 1 hour.

The webinar is sponsored by the AMURE joint research unit in Brest, Kiel Marine Science and the OMER Research Network.