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1. Due to the strong interconnectedness between the ocean and our societies worldwide, improved ocean governance is essential for sustainable development in the context of the UN Ocean Decade. However, a multitude of different perspectives—ecological, societal, political, economic—and relations between these have to be understood and taken into consideration to foster transformative pathways towards marine sustainability. 2. A core challenge that we are facing is that the ‘right’ response to complex societal issues cannot be known beforehand as abilities to predict complex systems are limited. Consequently, societal transformation is necessarily a journey towards the unknown and therefore requires experimental approaches that must enable the involvement of everyone with stakes in the future of our marine environment and its resources. 3. A promising transdisciplinary research method that fulfils both criteria—being participatory and experimental—are real-world laboratories. Here, we discuss how real-world labs can serve as an operational framework in the context of the Ocean Decade by facilitating and guiding successful knowledge exchange at the interface of science and society. The core element of real-world labs is transdisciplinary experimentation to jointly develop potential strategies leading to targeted real-world interventions, essential for achieving the proposed ‘Decade Outcomes’. 4. The authors specifically illustrate how deploying the concept of real-world labs can be advantageous when having to deal with multiple, overlapping challenges in the context of ocean governance and the blue economy. 5. Altogether, we offer a first major contribution to synthesizing knowledge on the potentials of marine real-world labs, considering how they act as a way of exploring options for sustainable ocean futures. Indeed, in the marine context, real-world labs are still under-explored but are a tangible way for addressing the societal challenges of working towards sustainability transformations over the coming UN Ocean Decade and beyond. BMBF CREATE BMBF Marisco Volkswagen Foundation ‘Niedersächsisches Vorab’ BMBF ‘Innovation and structural change—WIR!’

This chapter deploys assemblage theory and thinking to bring together a unique set of insights on the seabed ranging from the ecological, to legal, practice to theoretical. It does so with a particular aim in mind: to integrate debates pertinent to understanding the frontier space of the sea floor. Whilst there are increasing calls for interdisciplinary integration in the marine sciences, combining the natural and social sciences research on the space of the seabed and its potential for mining tends to be siloed with work addressing component parts of such possible processes: ecosystem and ecosystem service aspects, legal dimensions, and geopolitical aspects, to name but a few. Whilst these contributions touch upon intersecting issues (society and environment; law and economics, and so on) they remained centered on particular disciplinary and scientific offerings to understanding the seabed and prospect of seabed mining. This chapter offers a thoroughly ‘joined up’ approach, which presents a prism through which to better understand the issues at stake in venturing to the new vertical frontiers of ocean extraction.

With a focus on the ocean, we collaborated across social, ecological and legal disciplines to respond to the United Nations call for transformation in the ‘2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development’ by developing a set of 13 principles for transformative ocean governance. These principles can be used to help chart a course of action that responds to the many calls to reform current ocean-use practices based on economic growth models that have perpetuated inequities and fuelled conflict and environmental decline. We use a rigorous, iterative and transparent consensus building approach to define the principles, which we recommend are applied as a comprehensive set to transform unsustainable ocean governance practices and guide future initiatives. We show that the relationships between the principles can be supporting, neutral or sometimes conflicting, and discuss how best to manage these relationships in the pursuit of meaningful transformation.

Altres ajuts: acords transformatius de la UAB Altres ajuts: Obra Social La Caixa and COST Action CA15217 - Ocean Governance for Sustainability - challenges, options and the role of science (OceanGov) In spite of a proliferation of academic and policy-oriented interest in deep sea mining (DSM), this paper argues that two underlying questions remain underexplored. The first relates to what exactly the seabed is; the second to who the stakeholders are. It is argued that a greater interrogation of how the seabed is defined and understood, and a deeper consideration of how stakeholders are identified and the politics of their inclusion, is crucial to the enactment of policy and planning techniques. Through the analysis of current regulations to govern DSM in both national and international jurisdictions, this paper critically examines these seemingly banal but vital questions in different contexts. It is contended that most regulations are 'fuzzy' when it comes to addressing these questions, with the result that different understandings of the seabed and the implications of mining are ignored and that who stakeholders are and how they are defined causes many relevant voices to be unheard. It is argued, therefore, that it is imperative to address these often-overlooked questions directly in order to inform future seabed policy and governance.

This paper provides a critical contribution to the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-2030, outlining some of the core challenges of sustainable ocean governance and management by reflecting on modes and logics of interactions between ocean-related sciences, policy-makers and practitioners. In this regard, we give an overview of the potential for, and challenges of, transdisciplinary research which is essential to understanding the linkages between oceans and societies and thereby for attending to contemporary ocean concerns. The paper contributes both a review of transdisciplinary research and a particular format of transdisciplinary experimentation: Real-world Laboratories (RwLs). These are currently gaining traction as a method and approach for the co-creation of knowledge between the natural and social sciences and society to foster sustainability transformations. Altogether, we offer a first major contribution to synthesising knowledge on the potentials of marine RwLs, considering how they act as a way of exploring options for sustainable ocean futures through experimentation. Indeed, in the marine context, RwLs are under-explored but are a vital way for addressing the societal challenges of working towards transformations over the coming UN Ocean Decade.

Natural Flood Management (NFM) is the name given to Nature Based Solutions (NBS) for Flood Management in the UK. It is a holistic flood management technique that employs natural hydrological processes, through the instillation of interventions, to slow the flow of water, creating a landscape scale flood management system. Despite widespread interest and supporting policy from governments and non-profit organisations NFM, as yet, has not been widely adopted as a mainstream flood management technique. A small number of academic studies examining perceived barriers to NFM adoption have identified a variety of individual factors as being responsible. It is commonly accepted that flood risk management broadly, and NFM specifically, are complex, challenges of interacting physical and human parameters and that academic, institutional and policy divisions are rarely sympathetic to embracing these complexities. A transdisciplinary problem framing study in conjunction with professionals experienced in the delivery of NFM projects in the UK aimed to capture these multifaceted parameters of flood management and strategic delivery at a landscape scale using Group Concept Mapping, a systems approach to identify conceptual convergence. This policy-delivery impasse was further explored by quantifying the relative importance of individual barriers and conceptual groupings from the perspective of two different practitioner groups (flood risk managers and conservation practitioners). The results demonstrate that the NFM delivery system can be grouped into seven interacting elements: policy and regulation, politics, public perception, cross-cutting issues, funding, technical knowledge and evidence, of which each have a varying number of barriers that limit NFM uptake. Opinions differs as to the importance of these individual barriers, however when considering the system broadly we identify that the institutional and social barriers are perceived as the most important, whilst technical knowledge and evidence are the areas of least concern. This paper aims to promote NBS flood management delivery in the UK and globally by generating, structuring and representing the multifaceted and multilevel NFM delivery system at a local level to evidence adaptive decision making at a regional, national and global level. Through problem structuring and an increased understanding and awareness of the structure and network of linking elements and perceived differences of practitioner groups that influence the system of delivery, steps can be taken towards solutions that are socially, scientifically and practically robust.

The seas and oceans, ships and boats, alongside other maritime activities and practices, have become a focus of work within the “new mobilities paradigm.” However, water worlds much like the space they occupy in the relation to the land remain situated in the margins of such work, despite an oceanic (re)turn in disciplines such as human geography, sociology, anthropology, and politics. Drawing from this recognition, this article seeks to make two contributions. First, following earlier, agenda-setting work, it makes a renewed call for mobilities scholarship to centralize work on oceans, ships, and other forms seagoing travel and life. Second, in doing so, it suggests such work needs to voyage more deeply and widely in the future, exploring mobilities beyond surficial connections and flows across our oceans, and making more expansive the subjects and objects and scales of investigation, under the remit of the “new mobilities paradigm.”

Nature Based Solutions (NBS) is a practice based approach developed in response to the global challenge of on-going environmental degradation and biodiversity loss. Interventions that restore or mimic hydrological processes to slow water within a catchment come under an umbrella term of NBS for flood management. Proponents of the practice link its use as beneficial in reducing flood risk but also climate change adaptation, urban hazard management, sustainable agriculture and eco-hydrology. Despite promising an integrated and sustainable future and receiving policy support, catchment scale adoption is limited. Understanding, designing and delivering NBS flood management is complex, crossing multiple disciplinary divides and practitioner communities, each with its own history, background, methods and uncertainties. Barriers and intervention points within the delivery system has received little investigation from the view of environmental professional practice. This research addressed this gap through participatory case studies of projects delivering NBS in England. We found low agreement amongst practitioners on how NBS for flood management is distinguished, resulting in differing perspectives on its identity and contested boundaries between it and other land and water interventions. Our transdisciplinary research project sought and generated a context for delivery that breaks down disciplinary boundaries and in doing so a new system and intervention point emerged. The problem that practitioners used NBS for flood management to address is a homogenised water cycle: reduced infiltration and increased surface runoff. Therefore NBS for flood management aims to reverse this by restoring catchment hydrodiversity in harnessing hydrological processes for integrated sustainable urban and catchment management. The implications for academic thinking and land and water management practice created by the novel conceptualisation of a catchment possessing an attribute of hydrodiversity is far reaching. In relation to supporting NBS for flood management mainstream adoption: the conceptualisation draws together different land use systems and a shared goal to deliver catchment hydrodiversity emerges enabling coordinated flood management at multiple spatial scales and across professional practice and disciplinary groups.

This paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relations between health inequalities and migration, with a particular emphasis on health-selective migration. Papers in this journal have urged for a more nuanced consideration of connections between migration and health but these have not seen-through how to combine understandings of health and migration to better theorise their relations. A strong theoretical basis regarding the politics of mobilities can help say more of the structural factors shaping health-selective migration and therefore, changing health gradients in a population.

Geography has turned to towards the seas and oceans with much attention being paid to ‘water worlds’ through socio-cultural, political and environmental lenses. Geo-economic analysis in particular, has considered the role of containerisation, the port, and global logistics flows central to the contemporary shipping industry. However, where routeing enters discussion these debates remain ‘surficial’ with a focus on the rationale of lines of connection which are mapped onto the sea (rather than into the sea, as a liquid, three-dimensional, motionful space). This paper challenges considerations of ship routeing that only skim the surface. This paper adds depth to the discussion. It is argued that ship routeing is not a purely surficial exercise of charting a voyage across seas and oceans. Routes have a geo-politics predicted at times on the water’s depth, the topography of the ocean floor and seabed and marine resources. Drawing on a variety of examples, notably the traffic routeing scheme – or ‘maritime motorway’ – governing the flows of shipping in the Dover Strait, UK, this paper brings a ‘wet ontology’ and three-dimensional analysis to ship routeing. It is contended that such a recognition and discussion of deep routeing is necessary to shed light upon the often invisible processes sea that underscore the global logistics flows vital to society and the economy.

This article builds upon previous assertions that the ocean provides a fertile environment for reconceptualising understandings of space, time, movement and experiences of being in a transformative and mobile world. Following previous articles that urged scholars to adopt a ‘wet ontology’, this article presents a progression of, and a caveat to, these earlier arguments. As we have argued previously, liquid ‘materiality, motion, and temporality allows for new ways of thinking that are not possible when only thinking with the land’. This article maintains that critical perspectives can be gained by taking the ocean’s liquidity to heart. However, it also questions the premise of this vision. For the ocean is not simply liquid. It is solid (ice) and air (mist). It generates winds, which transport smells, and these may emote the oceanic miles inland. Although earlier attention to the ocean’s liquid volume was a necessary antidote to surficial static ontologies typically associated with land, this is insufficient in light of how the ocean exceeds material liquidity. This article thus explores what might emerge if, instead, one were to approach the ocean as offering a more-than-wet ontology, wherein its fluid nature is continually produced and dissipated.

In recent years “volume” has become a key analytic idea, and tool, for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. This paper argues that this important work could be pushed in new directions by thinking seriously of how volume might otherwise be interpreted spatially, as capacity . Accordingly, in this paper, we address what we call a “politics of capacity”. To do so, we draw specifically on debates in carceral geography and, in particular, the pressures on the prison system to illustrate our argument. Drawing on notions of “operational capacities” and “capacity building” in the prison setting, we outline a manifesto for volumetric thinking that moves beyond expressions of power that cut through height, depth and angles, to an understanding of how power is conveyed through maximum and minimum capacities; density and mass; and capacity‐building techniques.

Whilst historians and historical geographers have offered much to scholarship concerning military geographies, rarely have military mobilities been at the forefront of these enquiries. Where scholars have considered the movements that underscore military activities (within and beyond the theatre of war) movement is frequently taken to be the straightforward motion of people, equipment, vehicles and so on, from point A to B. This paper opens the special issue on ‘Military mobilities in an age of global war, 1870–1945’ by outlining the role that scholarship on mobility can play in understanding military operations and activities. It focuses on a number of military mobilities, examining how different technologies, knowledges, infrastructures and mobile embodied practices have been vital to military operations. Centred around four themes – military ‘moorings’ and ‘hubs’; military movement spaces; the work of military geographers on movement; and the movement of military bodies – this paper demonstrates how mobilities literature and historical geographies may intersect and inform one another. The paper closes by introducing the four papers which focus on the increasing mechanisation and mobilisation of military forces between 1870 and 1945.

Mobility and movement are central to military actions and military life, and yet despite an increasing concern with military geographies and the geographies of mobility, little consideration has been given by scholars to the political geographies of military mobilities and movements, past or present. In these interventions, we examine how these different bodies of work might intersect, focusing on social media, methods for tracing military mobilities, the role of military technologies in facilitating everyday mobilities, and the more-than-human dimensions of military mobilities.

In this brief response to Stuart Elden’s thought-provoking essay ‘Terrain, Politics, History’, I question whether place, one of the most ubiquitous concepts worked with by geographers, might have a place itself in studies of territory and provide another way of attending to the neglect of the materiality of territory. In raising this point, I further ask if attention should also be shifted more broadly to the terrains of social and cultural geographies. Here an extensive body of work has investigated more-than-human materialist approaches to making sense of the world and examined the agencies and role of landscape. Both lenses, I argue, could offer a great deal to theorisations of territory and its materiality, which are perhaps overlooked, within territory’s position as a concept of the subdiscipline of political geography. In sum, I posit that geography has already dealt quite significantly with the materiality of the Earth in other strands of the discipline, and this work may offer much in dialogue with efforts to materialise our thinking of territory.

This paper offers a conceptual contribution to understanding ocean governance and the management of spaces for the protection of marine biodiversity, organization of extractive industries, the arrangement of global shipping and other ‘blue-economy’ uses. Rather than focus on one type of management technique (such as a Marine Protected Area (MPA) or example of Marine Spatial Planning), or a site- or species-specific case study of governance, this paper offers a theoretical tracking of the uncharted territories of governance that foreground ocean management approaches. The literature on ocean governance and management techniques predominantly derive from scientific disciplines (which provide the basis for planning) and policy-related social science fields, leaving a lacuna in more critical discussions of ways of knowing and understanding the world that drive it. The paper argues the need to critically understand the ontologies (the regimes of what we believe exists) and geophilosophies (the geographically informed modes of thinking) of territory that underscore ocean management to make sense of its past successes and failures, its present functioning and its future directions. This paper argues that without critical consideration of the kinds of thinking—the ontologies and geophilosophies—that drive ocean management, it will lack the transformative potential many hope it will achieve for sustainable development. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Integrative research perspectives on marine conservation’.

Assuming that the more a restaurant’s manager know the preferences of his/her clients, the greater the chance to maximise the experience of the customers and therefore the revenue of the restaurant. However, very little is known about the attributes that influence menu-item choice of such customers in a restaurant context and consequently, on the relative importance attached to specific attributes shaping the overall appeal of a menu-item. Despite the familiarity that consumers have with making menu-item choices, there exists a significant paucity of academic research exploring the relative importance of attributes that influence menu-item selection in a restaurant context. This research aims to respond to the following question: what are the attributes that influence menu-item choice in a casual and fine-dining restaurants context? To explore further the reasons that influence menu-item choice, the authors also investigate the extent the customers’ level of food involvement and the social context have an impact on the attributes influencing menu-item choice in these two restaurants’ contexts. This study utilises the Best-Worst method to examine consumer-based preference in relation to the relative importance of attributes that influence the menu-item choice of casual and fine-dining restaurant patrons. Respondents should have patronised a casual or fine-dining restaurant within the last 4 weeks and 6 months respectively and were randomly allocated the task to respond the questions either with a casual-dining context in mind or with a fine-dining context in mind. Consumer attribute-based preferences are also examined in relation to an individual’s level of food involvement and effect of social context, giving the authors the opportunity to split the entire sample into sub groups. The overarching objective is to draw comparisons in order to determine whether the attributes that influence menu-item choice differ between segments of consumers. Quantitative data was collected from 1208 respondents in Australia representative of casual and fine-dining restaurant patrons. Results of the study indicate that “the combination of ingredients” is the most influential attribute on patrons’ menu-item selection at casual and fine-dining restaurants, with a probability of 100% for that attribute to be chosen as the most important one when selecting a dish. Conversely, the “avoidance of certain foods” and “the core ingredient of the dish is sustainably produced” are the least important attributes influencing the menu-item selection of restaurant patrons, with a probability of 30 and 38% for these attributes to be chosen as the most important one when selecting a dish. Interestingly, the ranking and relative importance of menu-item attributes significantly differed between segments of consumers with a high and low level of food involvement. The “the combination of ingredients” remains the most important reason for people highly involved in food. Whereas “a sufficient portion size that will satisfy my appetite” and “a dish that I have tried before and know that I will like the taste” have probabilities of 100 and 94.5% to be chosen as the most important attribute when selecting a dish for people with low food involvement.

This chapter examines the ways in which the spaces where rebel radio was produced (the ship, at sea) created intimate soundscapes infused with geopolitical capacities. The chapter charts how the architecture of the ships and their location at sea were imbricated in the social conditions for crews of DJs on board, and how those situated crews were then themselves enfolded into the production of intimate, geopolitical soundscapes through the spatial organisation of their offshore workplace. The chapter draws upon literatures concerned with ‘intimate geopolitics’, pushing these in new directions through an investigation of radio—the most intimate of mass communications mediums.

Having examined the political registers enlivened through listening practice on land, this chapter turns to the air and to radio waves, considering the ways in which the British government sought to regulate ‘rebel’ radio and the threat to order which it posed. The chapter begins by examining government objections to the soundscapes of the radio pirates, before exploring the responses put in place to contest sound waves reaching listeners onshore. Notably, the chapter explores the challenges of attempting to regulate an invisible medium through efforts of jamming to the removal of physical media infrastructure. It contends that more attention must be paid to ‘wavelengths’ as a means of understanding transboundary geopolitics.

This chapter argues that it is essential for geographers to take seriously the spatialities of radio, which remain under-examined in the literature. Focusing on contemporary examples of rebel radio and its continued significance, it is argued that there is no better time to explore the production, consumption, and regulation of such soundscapes and the geophysical spaces that shape and are shaped by broadcasting. Drawing conclusions, this chapter summarises the central contributions of the text and paves the way for future studies of sound and radio, highlighting potential avenues of further exploration.

This chapter introduces the case study around which this book is developed: offshore, rebel broadcasting stations such as Radio Caroline. It also justifies the relevance of this example for understanding sound–space–society connections. Offshore radio piracy marks a pivotal moment in social history. The soundscape of the British Isles was dominated by the radio transmissions of one, authorised broadcaster: the BBC. Yet by the 1960s demand for alternative forms of radio broadcasting were rising. This chapter charts the context of the emergence of the radio pirates; how the spaces of the air and sea legally enabled their activities; the subsequent style of sound broadcasting that was made possible; and the key moments of the phenomenon that led to its eventual closure.

This chapter moves from the sea to the shore and to the millions of listeners on land, investigating how they consumed rebel radio broadcasts. Arguing that listening is a practice that shapes and is shaped by relations between bodies and an expanded field of non-human materials, and more-than-human life, the chapter considers how the intimate soundscapes described in Chap. 3 were received, generating atmospheric spaces of listening. These atmospheric listening spaces, it is argued, were affective as listeners became immersed within the politics surrounding the pirate broadcasting phenomenon, namely the ongoing fight for free radio. The chapter demonstrates how a contemporary concern with affective atmospheres can be rethought through the example of rebel radio stations.

Why examine the relations between sound, space and society, and why do so through the lens of rebel radio stations? This chapter sets the scene for the book, attending to the turn towards multi-sensory geographies, geographies of sound, music, and mediated geographies, before outlining the need to take radio seriously within such work. Notably, this chapter argues that current scholarship related to radio could push further through investigating how the very aesthetics of sound shape (and are shaped by) space, and society. The chapter closes by signposting the book to follow, with a brief overview of chapters.

Using a variety of devices from visual displays, material objects, sensory engagements and embodied performance, museums select and narrate particular moments in history to an increasingly active audience. Thus far, focus on specific elements of museum design has eluded the altogether more pervasive, intangible and complex sensations designed, engineered, co-constituted and also arising unexpectedly from these sites: atmospheres. This article draws upon a particular museum experience – that of the prison museum – to interrogate how atmospheres are a key component of re-telling the past. Here, the authors explore the production and consumption of what they term ‘carceral atmospheres’. Focusing on two prison museums, the article explores how visitors unlock experiences of incarceration via the variety of atmospheric sensations calculated and provoked in these museum settings through visual/material manifestations and cues. The authors conclude that understanding atmospheric design is vital to gaining a deeper appreciation of how heritage sites function in the 21st century.

This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time. In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from notions of fixity towards fluidity and flow, and, in so doing, have developed networked, ‘flat’ ontologies. Recent attempts have gone further, challenging the horizontalism inherent in such approaches by opening up a vertical world of volume. In this paper we contend that such approaches are still somewhat lacking. The vertical element of volume is all too often abstract and dematerialised; the emphasis on materiality that is typically used to rectify this excess of abstraction tends to reproduce a sense of matter as fixed and grounded; and the temporality that is employed to reintroduce ‘motion’ to matter has the unintended effect of signalling a periodised sense of time that minimises the chaotic underpinnings and experiences of place. We argue that the ocean is an ideal spatial foundation for addressing these challenges since it is indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual reformation, and that a ‘wet ontology’ can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates that are all too often restricted by terrestrial limits.

Recent literature in carceral geography has attended to the importance of mobilities in interrogating the experience and control of spaces of imprisonment, detention and confinement. Scholars have explored the paradoxical nature of incarcerated experience as individuals oscillate between moments of fixity and motion as they are transported to/from carceral environments. This paper draws upon the convict ship – an example yet to gain attention within these emerging discussions – which is both an exemplar of this paradox and a lens through which to complicate understandings of carceral (im)mobilities. The ship is a space of macro-movement from point A to B, whilst simultaneously a site of apparent confinement for those aboard who are unable to move beyond its physical parameters. Yet, we contend that all manner of mobilities permeate the internal space of the ship. Accordingly, we challenge the binary thinking that separates moments of fixity from motion and explore the constituent parts that shape movement. In paying attention to movements in motion on the ship, we argue that studies of carceral mobility must attend to both methods of moving in the space between points A and B; as micro, embodied and intimate (im)mobilities are also played out within large-scale regimes of movement.

This paper advocates a critical analysis of drifting as a particular typology of mobility. Drifting is a commonplace term used across the social sciences and particularly within physical, urban and psycho‐geographic strands of geography. However, drifting has not been unpacked within a mobilities framework as a specific trope of moving, nor has it been taken ‘to sea’ by social scientists. This is surprising given the long‐standing relationship between drift, drifting and the ocean. Recent years have witnessed a ‘filling out’ and ‘deepening’ of mobilities studies in geography and the broader social sciences, wherein mobility is not taken as singular and undifferentiated, but rather can be broken down into more specific parts that constitute particular technologies, experiences, forms and conditions of moving. This study dissects drifting by investigating the intricacies of this mobile quality and the quality of mobility. In particular, the paper draws on drifting in the context of the sea in order to demonstrate the new knowledges made possible by moving examinations from city spaces (where drifting has been most readily employed as conceptual tool and method). Indeed, drawing on case studies of drifting at sea, this paper argues that a focus on this distinctive form of mobility generates new insights into the politics of what it means to move in the maritime realm, a space often neglected in studies of mobilities.