Making Ocean Governance Work: Bridging Science, Policy, and Practice Through Co-Designed Research

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.