Abstracts Submission

This thematic issue advances a necessary shift in ocean science toward research with practitioners, moving beyond research for practitioners. By leveraging complementary objectives across academia, government, and communities, this issue aims to highlight contributions that are directly relevant to decision-making, policy-making, and management implementation.

Although collaboration is widely recognized as essential, practitioner perspectives and applied experience remain underrepresented in academic literature. At the same time, academic spaces are evolving, creating new opportunities to meaningfully integrate practitioner knowledge through diverse partnerships and research programs. Ocean research has long emphasized the science–policy interface, yet ensuring that research outputs are implementable, accepted, and owned by those responsible for action remains a critical and underexplored challenge.

This thematic issue centers on practice and how ocean governance becomes tangible, actionable, and effective in real-world contexts. Co-designed research, developed collaboratively with practitioners, helps to bridge the gap between knowledge and action by aligning research with operational realities, institutional contexts, and on-the-ground constraints to enable the integrative capacity needed to support equitable and effective outcomes.

We welcome “pracademic” contributions to bring together academic and practitioner expertise to advance ocean governance, policy, and management implementation across a range of topics. Submissions may be grounded in applied contexts such as Marine spatial planning, marine protected areas, integrated ocean management, sustainable ocean planning, blue economy strategy, ecosystem-based management, and ecosystem-based fisheries management. In particular, contributions that demonstrate how co-designed processes lead to tangible outcomes; examine how policies and tools can be made usable for practitioners; identify enabling conditions for effective and equitable governance; and share practitioner-informed case studies and lessons learned.

This thematic issue aims to strengthen the links between science, policy, and practice by elevating practitioner voices and centering real-world insights, ensuring that ocean governance research is not only informative but also actionable and impactful. To support this vision, we encourage authorship teams to include at least one contributor or author with direct, on-the-ground experience in ocean management or governance, including individuals from government, NGOs, community groups, and Indigenous organizations.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Ocean and Society is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 100 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.

Coastal areas have long served as material records of the changing relationships between human societies and the sea. Beyond major port and coastal cities, which have concentrated capital, technology, and global connectivity, the coast has also been shaped by peripheral and heterogeneous environments, such as fishing villages, rural marshlands, leisure developments, and small industrial towns.

In the post-war period, these settlements underwent significant transformations. Industrialisation, increased mobility, and the expansion of tourism reshaped patterns of inhabitation, introducing new spatial dynamics and environmental pressures. Settlements previously structured by local communities, seasonality, and short-distance networks were progressively reconfigured or displaced as coastal economies were reorganised into more continuous regimes of production and consumption. Interwar informal and small-scale leisure developments, ribbon suburbanisation along coastal roads, and hybrid industrial towns by the sea contributed to the emergence of increasingly fragmented and unequal territories.

Today, in-between coastal areas constitute a complex and layered archive of human–sea relations. They reveal how architecture and settlement patterns respond to ecological variability, economic change, and shifting cultural values. However, due to their marginal and dispersed condition, often distant from dominant economic interests and only partially captured in official documentation, many of these environments have remained outside dominant historical narratives. Studying these contexts therefore requires methodological and disciplinary reflection, prompting a reconsideration of how built environments are examined and which tools and sources are employed.

This thematic issue seeks to expand the field of coastal studies by foregrounding the history of coastal peripheries. We invite contributions that examine how low- and middle-density coastal settlements have been produced, transformed, and reinterpreted from the post-war period to the present. We welcome interdisciplinary research from architecture, urbanism, environmental history, geography, anthropology, and related fields. Contributions may address, but are not limited to, the following themes:

• Adaptive coasts: Environments shaped by continuous adaptation to economic, social, and ecological change.
• Coastal conflicts: Sites of conflict between competing uses, actors, and territorial regimes.
• Seasonal coasts: Environments marked by cyclical patterns of occupation and fluctuating populations.
• Coasts of failure: Sites of abandoned or underperforming projects that expose the limits of coastal development.
• Degraded coasts: Environments shaped by pollution and climate pressures, exposing risks, remediation challenges, and uneven responsibility.
• Productive coasts: fishing, resource extraction, and coastal industries as drivers of settlement and architectural form.

Authors interested in submitting a paper for this issue are asked to consult the journal's instructions for authors and submit their abstracts (maximum of 250 words, with a tentative title) through the abstracts system (here). When submitting their abstracts, authors are also asked to confirm that they are aware that Ocean and Society is an open access journal with a publishing fee if the article is accepted for publication after peer-review (corresponding authors affiliated with our institutional members do not incur this fee).

Readers across the globe will be able to access, share, and download this issue entirely for free. Corresponding authors affiliated with any of our institutional members (over 100 institutions worldwide) publish free of charge. Otherwise, an article processing fee will be charged to the authors to cover editorial costs. We defend that authors should not have to personally pay this fee and encourage them to check with their institutions if funds are available to cover open access publication costs. Further information about the journal's open access charges can be found here.