Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: OCEAN Sustainability Pathways for Achieving Conflict Transformation

This award provides support to U.S. researchers participating in a project competitively selected by a 55-country initiative on global change research through the Belmont Forum. The Belmont Forum is a consortium of research funding organizations focused on support for transdisciplinary approaches to global environmental change challenges and opportunities.

It aims to accelerate delivery of the international research most urgently needed to remove critical barriers to sustainability by aligning and mobilizing international resources. Each partner country provides funding for their researchers within a consortium to alleviate the need for funds to cross international borders. This approach facilitates effective leveraging of national resources to support excellent research on topics of global relevance best tackled through a multinational approach, recognizing that global challenges need global solutions.

Working together in this Collaborative Research Action, the partner agencies have provided support to foster global transdisciplinary research teams to address critical issues in ocean sustainability including, conservation and sustainable use of the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. This complex challenge required that the projects utilized integrated, transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches and bring together natural and social sciences as well as policymakers, resource managers, industries, citizens and other societal partners.

This award provides support for the U.S. researchers to cooperate in consortia that consist of partners from at least three of the participating countries to increase our knowledge of the complex linkages and pathways needed to accelerate sustainable use of oceans and minimize the effects from global change.

The project aims to investigate how existing conflict resolution practices impact ocean sustainability by examining how formal interventions (law) and informal practices (negotiation) can be harnessed toward conflict resolution. These studies are based on the idea that ocean sustainability prospects depend on building tailor-made capabilities to analyze, productively manage, and transform ocean conflicts.

Since ocean conflict resolution is an under-developed field of scholarship and practice, the team aims to use comparative analysis to study conflicts that traverse the Global North and South, in South Africa, India, Brazil, Norway/Barents Sea, Baltic Sea and United States. The project is projected to help develop insight into diverse ocean conflicts through real-world collaboration of context-specific research teams that include stakeholder partners, social and natural scientists, and conflict resolution experts.

The new knowledge gained will be used to develop and test ocean conflict resolution tools and practices. The Oceans PACT project will generate significant scientific and socio-political benefits in the case studies that result from this proposal, ideally forming conflict resolution practices that foster global ocean sustainability.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.