With discontent rising in response to insufficient action to address climate, biodiversity, equity, democracy, and peace challenges, activism is prevalent. We explore a history of civil disobedience, direct action and protest related to gender equality, anti-war and anti-nuclear movements, the protection of indigenous rights, nature, and LGBT+ rights, to consider the role of academics amid interlinked climate, biodiversity and peace crises. In the pursuit of a safe and just future, these crises need more activism, in forms that are creative and that challenge norms, that trigger our imagination and appeal to a willingness to act. Science is a trade marked by creativity. Academics can no longer resort to only publishing papers, and clenching fists in pockets. Instead, there is a need to consider how to make best use of academic knowledge and creativity to support diverse activism: in board rooms, with corporate leaders, with politicians, youth organisations, universities, and in the streets. These activities should be grounded in research, but may still risk being regarded as threatening to academic credibility. Academics should be prepared for, and find novel ways to engage with, both tension and animosity.

Managing industrial fisheries presents a persistent and complex sustainability challenge. Despite the establishment of comprehensive regulatory frameworks, international agreements, and voluntary certification schemes, fisheries worldwide continue to face overfishing, illegal practices, weak governance, and contribute to habitat degradation. Rather than discrete or isolated problems, industrial fisheries are better conceptualised as nested collective action dilemmas, in which environmental externalities emerge from decisions made by diverse actors operating across multiple governance levels. Actions taken by individual fishers, firms, or governance institutions often produce cascading effects that cross spatial and institutional boundaries, further complicated by the mobility of marine species and the transboundary nature of marine ecosystems. This thesis explores how voluntary collective action, inspired by stewardship aspirations, can contribute to more sustainable fisheries governance. Comprising four papers grounded in social-ecological systems thinking, it examines diverse efforts to coordinate sustainability commitments among industry actors. Paper I traces the evolution of seafood stewardship over the past five decades and identifies four dimensions that enable collective action: moving beyond compliance, adopting systems perspectives, embracing uncertainty, and recognising the embeddedness of humans in the biosphere. Paper II investigates pre-competitive collaborations as voluntary sustainability initiatives, focusing on their design and regulatory fit, but also their frequent lack of enforcement and systematic evaluation. Paper III employs process tracing in the Barents Sea cod fishery to examine how critical events shaped and were shaped by social relationships in the development and institutionalisation of collective action. It highlights the role of Interaction Rituals and trust-building in influencing governance outcomes. Paper IV addresses the governance of transshipment, a contested practice often linked to illegal fishing, by mapping the ownership of refrigerated cargo vessels. It argues that a nested governance approach, combining formal regulation with voluntary initiatives, provides new and innovative ways of governing this practice. Together, these papers suggest that voluntary collective action can effectively complement state-led governance when underpinned by trust, transparency, and accountability. Due to the complexity of industrial fisheries, achieving sustainability will require hybrid governance structures that combine stewardship-focused cooperation with strong regulatory institutions.

A central barrier to effective governance and accountability in fisheries is the limited transparency of corporate ownership. Transshipment—the transfer of catches, fuel, parts, or crew between fishing and cargo vessels known as reefers—is often criticized for its opacity and poor governance. Better insight into the beneficial ownership of vessels involved in transshipment and their operational patterns could lead to more effective management. Our study presents a publicly accessible database of reefers’ owners, operators, and flags. We identified 569 individual reefers and found that Russian and Chinese owners control 26 and 20% of the global reefer fleet, respectively. Results also show that 65% of all reefer vessels fly the flags of Russia, Panama, or China. This high level of consolidation suggests considerable leverage for enhancing transparency and governance. Our findings highlight the potential for reforming existing transshipment practices through collaboration among owners, flag states, fishery regulators, and scientists.

We find ourselves at a critical crossroads for the future governance of the high seas, but the perceived remoteness of the global ocean creates a psychological barrier for people to engage with it. Given challenges of over-exploitation, inequitable access and other sustainability and equity concerns, current ocean governance mech-anisms are not fit-for-purpose. This decade offers opportunities for direct impact on ocean governance, however, triggering a global transformation on how we use and protect the half of our planet requires a concerted effort that is guided by shared values and principles across regions and sectors. The aim of the series of workshops outlined in this paper, was to undertake a futures thinking process that could use the Nature Futures Framework as a mechanism to bring more transformative energy into how humans conceptualise the high seas and therefore how we aim to govern the ocean. We found that engaging with the future through science fiction narratives allowed a more radical appreciation of what could be and infusing science with artistic elements can inspire audiences beyond academia. Thus, creative endeavours of co-production that promote and encourage imagi-nation to address current challenges should be considered as important tools in the science-policy interface, also as a way to elicit empathetic responses. This workshop series was a first, and hopefully promising, step towards generating a more creative praxis in how we imagine and then act for a better future for the high seas.

The biosphere crisis requires changes to existing business practices. We ask how corporations can become sustainability leaders, when constrained by multiple barriers to collaboration for biosphere stewardship. We describe how scientists motivated, inspired and engaged with ten of the world’s largest seafood companies, in a collaborative process aimed to enable science-based and systemic transformations (2015–2021). CEOs faced multiple industry crises in 2015 that incentivized novel approaches. New scientific insights, an invitation to collaborate, and a bold vision of transformative change towards ocean stewardship, created new opportunities and direction. Co-creation of solutions resulted in new knowledge and trust, a joint agenda for action, new capacities, international recognition, formalization of an organization, increased policy influence, time-bound goals, and convergence of corporate change. Independently funded scientists helped remove barriers to cooperation, provided means for reflection, and guided corporate strategies and actions toward ocean stewardship. By 2021, multiple individuals exercised leadership and the initiative had transitioned from preliminary and uncomfortable conversations, to a dynamic, operational organization, with capacity to perform global leadership in the seafood industry. Mobilizing transformational agency through learning, collaboration, and innovation represents a cultural evolution with potential to redirect and accelerate corporate action, to the benefit of business, people and the planet. 

Humanity has never benefited more from the ocean as a source of food, livelihoods, and well-being, yet on a global scale this has been accompanied by trajectories of degradation and persistent inequity. Awareness of this has spurred policymakers to develop an expanding network of ocean governance instruments, catalyzed civil society pressure on the public and private sector, and motivated engagement by the general public as consumers and constituents. Among local communities, diverse examples of stewardship have rested on the foundation of care, knowledge and agency. But does an analog for stewardship exist in the context of globally active multinational corporations? Here, we consider the seafood industry and its efforts to navigate this new reality through private governance. We examine paradigmatic events in the history of the sustainable seafood movement, from seafood boycotts in the 1970s through to the emergence of certification measures, benchmarks, and diverse voluntary environmental programs. We note four dimensions of stewardship in which efforts by actors within the seafood industry have aligned with theoretical concepts of stewardship, which we describe as (1) moving beyond compliance, (2) taking a systems perspective, (3) living with uncertainty, and (4) understanding humans as embedded elements of the biosphere. In conclusion, we identify emerging stewardship challenges for the seafood industry and suggest the urgent need to embrace a broader notion of ocean stewardship that extends beyond seafood.