Blue Growth is the EU's long-term policy to promote sustainable economic growth in the maritime sector and aims to create new jobs and business opportunities while also preserving the marine environment and its health. Yet, particularly in maritime realms, gender equality in terms of job opportunities and participation in the use, management, and development of marine resources are unbalanced, as women's contributions are too often hindered, overlooked, or undervalued. New perspectives on blue growth offer an opportunity to reverse these trends. In Europe, and especially in the Nordic countries with a history of commitment to gender equality and women’s emancipation, there is nevertheless an absence of women’s participation both in management and in operations within various sectors associated with the blue growth. Recognizing that research on gender perspectives has not sufficiently captured gender-relevant themes, the thematic issue on “gender” aims towards filling the gaps and raising these issues in marine and maritime sectors from a broad perspective. Marine sectors and non-economic activities encompass fisheries and aquaculture, tourism, cultural heritage, well-being and blue health, renewable energy, and maritime transport, among others.
The thematic issue welcomes articles from different disciplines that lift the following central questions or alike:

• How can women’s participation in blue growth be embedded?
• How can gender-sensitive blue growth policies and programs be developed to establish an equitable future for all genders?
• How can gender-sensitive policies and programs increase the participation of non-traditional seafarers in blue growth?
• How can women’s skills and capacity in the maritime sector be enhanced?
• What are the means that would increase women’s participation in decision-making processes related to the management and conservation of marine natural resources?
• How are more enabling environments for women’s and non-binary persons’ participation, involvement, retention, and safety needs in the maritime sector created?

For the most part, academic discourse on Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14) tends to focus on the negatives, more specifically the lack of progress, limitations, and barriers in achieving its seven targets and three sub-targets. While the study of the challenges in reaching key targets and goals is critical in understanding the myriad of issues facing the world’s oceans and seas, are we failing to give due recognition to the important work being undertaken at a local, regional, and global level to implement SDG 14 and improve the health of our coastal and marine environments?

This thematic issue will highlight stories of success in implementing SDG 14 from so-called “outliers.” Cinner et al. (2016), suggested that the theory and practice of identifying and learning from outliers could assist in combating the ongoing decline in the world’s coral reefs. Outliers being places where marine ecosystems are found to be performing substantially better than expected given the environmental conditions and socioeconomic drivers they are exposed to. Expanding upon this idea of outliers, this thematic issue calls for success stories in implementing SGD 14 targets, including contributions on new approaches and innovative ways of engaging with legal, scientific, and sociological perspectives as well as initiatives, programs, projects, and plans being undertaken in an effective way to conserve and sustainably use our oceans, seas, and marine resources.

Drawing upon these success stories, this thematic issue seeks to address the following questions:

• Who are the outliers in implementing SDG 14 and where are they located?
• Why are these outliers successful and what underpins their success?
• What lessons can we learn from these success stories?
• How can these lessons be implemented on a broader scale to assist in combating the ever-increasing list of threats facing our oceans and seas?

This thematic issue introduces the term “maritime justice” and explores its practical and conceptual underpinnings. Maritime justice is cursorily defined as a socio-legal term. It analyses the complex regulatory and law enforcement responses under international, transnational, and domestic law that aim to curb a range of maritime crimes and risks, which have been subject to much policy attention over the past two decades. Crimes and risks include, inter alia, piracy, illegal, unregulated, and unreported (IUU) fishing, smuggling activities, marine pollution, irregular migration, sabotage against underwater cables and pipelines, terrorism, and naval tensions. In turn, the complex responses include, inter alia, maritime law enforcement, prosecution, policy and administrative measures, new technologies, advocacy, training, capacity-building, strategy development, and legal reform. Thus far, responses to maritime crimes and risks have been explored in maritime security studies from perspectives of law and international relations, yet without systematic and comprehensive attention to the differences and similarities that may exist in said responses across thematic and geographic spaces—and rarely from a socio-legal perspective.

The thematic issue takes this effort forward, combining sociological and legal perspectives to explore maritime justice as a distinct research agenda. From different perspectives, it addresses the following questions:

• What is the scope of maritime justice, and how may we define its substance, practically, legally, and conceptually?
• How do the distinct features of maritime justice relate to land, socially, politically, and culturally?
• What are the policy aims of maritime justice, and who are its providers and beneficiaries?

Contributions may be theoretical or empirical in nature but share a methodological commitment to studying regulatory and law enforcement responses to maritime insecurity from a practical perspective, thus thinking through how challenges, opportunities, frameworks, and actors related to maritime responses and their land-based connections can inform the conceptualization of maritime justice.

The task of mapping and representing oceans and their transformations is at the heart of ocean research. Not least because Western mythology has framed oceans, and ocean life, as a trope of the unseeable, hence unknowable, for a long time. The currently changing ways of looking at oceans coincide with a rise in artistic research that has gained significant traction over the last two decades. An indication of this is the development of numerous new PhD programmes in artistic research around the world, sometimes offered jointly by art universities and social sciences or humanities universities.

Since the seminal work of Solid Sea by the group Multiplicity about the routes of tourists, migrants, seamen, and others that cross but don’t touch, shown at Documenta 11 in Kassel in 2002, there has been a steady growth of artistic research seeking to visualise the complexities of life in, on, and around oceans. The significance of this development can be seen, amongst others, in the initiation of Forensic Oceanography, a collaborative project between Lorenzo Pezzani and Charles Heller, which developed out of Forensic Architecture, the human rights-oriented research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, or the founding of Ocean Space, established and led by TBA21–Academy, which runs a high-profile exhibition programme in Venice dedicated to creating a collaborative platform for ocean imagination and ocean action, and presenting works such as the multi-screen installation Oceans in Transformation by Territorial Agency, that synthesised three years of intersectional research.

This thematic issue aims to chart what new perspectives artistic research can contribute to the discourse on oceans and society by tracking the breadth and scope of key works and practices in this field and highlighting potential new avenues opened up by emerging research.

To make these currents tangible, this thematic issue welcomes articles exploring questions like:

• How is artistic research on oceans and ocean life navigating the junctions of seeing and knowing, representation and evidence, experience and belief?
• How does artistic research engage with the issue of visuality as a critical parameter in ocean research, both in terms of engendering recognition and enabling discourse?
• How can the narrative and dialogical dimensions of artistic research help emphasise societal aspects of ocean research and further its transdisciplinary relevance and political impact?
• How can the specificities of artistic research foster new ways of engaging with the fluidity of ocean environments?
• In what ways can artistic research open up new approaches in dealing with the challenges inherent in ocean research such as the challenges of scale, fluctuation, or metamorphosis?

Many port cities across the globe have long thrived on maritime flows and trade connections, leveraging their strategic locations to drive socio-spatial and economic growth. Ports functioning as gateways and hubs have historically been of key importance for local economies. However, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and technological advancements, such as containerisation and innovation in the shipping industry, the dynamic between ports and cities has been undergoing significant changes. While they are often governed by separate entities—port authorities and municipalities or city councils—ports and cities remain closely intertwined in terms of spatial connectivity and shared interests in the port-city interface spaces. Yet, as ports continue to influence and shape urban landscapes, there is a pressing need to introduce new tools and perspectives to understand how global flows through maritime infrastructures reshape the built environment. Moreover, as the process of port regionalization, defined as the impact of ports on its adjacent territories, continues, the area affected by port-related activities becomes increasingly more complex and extensive. Therefore, fostering dialogue and collaboration among stakeholders in ports, cities, and regions becomes imperative. Port-city-regions are, therefore, complex geographic areas characterised by a metropolitan region with proximity to a major port(s) and port-related activities (sea and inland). Such regions become central hubs for shipping, cargo handling, and related industries, playing a pivotal role in regional and global economies and trade networks.

Maritime transport is a catalyst for urban and regional development. Still, it also brings negative externalities to urban and rural or sparsely populated environments, such as pollution, congestion, and noise. Addressing these challenges is vital for sustainable port, city, and regional development. Discussions on green ports, blue growth, and green corridors have spurred environmental awareness and encouraged efforts toward sustainable port operations and increased marine traffic. With these discussions come a proliferation of new concepts and terminologies, necessitating exploration to establish a common language that bridges the gap between research, planning, policy, and practice.

This thematic issue seeks to advance the conceptual, theoretical, and empirical discussion around the spatiality of port(s) and their hosting cities in different regions of the world. The aim is to contribute to the large body of literature by identifying the territorial typology of port cities starting from the global flows (commodity, passengers, and knowledge) that run through maritime and inland ports and create a complex ecosystem. Contributions from various disciplines in urban and social studies should, in particular, address (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• Typologies and hierarchies of spaces shaped by maritime flows at the port-city interface and within the wider region
• Taxonomy of spatial impacts of ports on the surrounding landscape that is affected by the port or port-related activities and vice versa
• Innovative interdisciplinary methodologies and tools for studying and planning contemporary port city regions
• The role of institutions and multiplicity of stakeholders in shaping port city regions
• A glossary of policy toolkits, actions, and strategies for sustainable development of port-city-regions
• Examples of multiscale planning tools for governing port city regions, i.e., local and municipal plans, sectorial plans, port planning, Maritime Spatial Planning, etc.
• Revisiting the concept of port-city relationship through the lens of new urban waterfront and urban regeneration

The integration of different knowledges is considered essential in ocean and coastal governance for understanding and addressing the complex and transboundary changes that oceans and societies are affected by. In this line, the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Development (2021–2030) calls for “the science we need for the ocean we want” and the 5th International Polar Year (2032–2033) evolves around “the urgent need for coordinated international research to tackle the biggest challenges of polar research, for both the Polar Regions themselves and for the world as a whole.”

This thematic issue derives from the notion that the “coordination” and integration of different knowledges to develop advanced understandings is a political process that is shaped amongst others by societal inequalities and different governance formats in place. To assess the implication of this notion for the governance of the oceans, the “common heritage of humankind” (United Nations Law of the Sea), this thematic issue explores knowledge integration processes in ocean governance. It sheds light on different governance formats, the role of participatory and co-creative approaches of knowledge integration, their potentials, limitations, and the micropolitics related to them. We invite contributions from different scientific disciplines that introduce and assess concepts of relevance in different regional settings or for the “global ocean” at large, by investigating questions like:

• How much and what kind of knowledge integration can actually be found in ocean governance arrangements?
• What is the role of participatory and co-creative research approaches in different areas (like geopolitical and socio-economic fields) in ocean governance?
• How do institutional arrangements and mechanisms encourage or hinder the integration of different knowledges and perspectives in ocean governance?
• Under what conditions can participatory and co-creative research approaches advance or limit the legitimacy and/or effectiveness of ocean governance?
• How should co-created research ideally feed into ocean governance and how do existing governance formats would have to change?