Announcement Calenda 1 351 288
Against a backdrop of increasing pressure on African coastlines, including erosion, overfishing, pollution and conflicts of use, the blue economy is emerging as a strategic horizon for reconciling economic development, social inclusion and ecological sustainability. However, this notion, often promoted by international bodies, is based on technocratic, top-down approaches that tend to marginalize local knowledge and cultural practices derived from the experience of coastal communities. In Africa, such knowledge, long perceived as "traditional" or "informal", nonetheless constitutes a reservoir of skills, norms of use and representations of the marine world, essential for thinking about integrated and situated management of marine and coastal resources. From a sociological point of view, this symposium is in line with work on the co-production of knowledge (Jasanoff, 2004), environmental commons (Ostrom, 1990) and participatory governance (Fung and Wright, 2003), which questions the way in which scientific and lay knowledge can dialogue to build legitimate, effective and equitable public policies. The aim is to go beyond a strictly extractivist vision of the blue economy and give it a territorial and social scope, by placing local stakeholders - such as artisanal fishermen, women processors, ecotourism guides, etc. - at the heart of the dynamics of innovation, regulation and valorization.
Moreover, from a postcolonial perspective, the recognition of local knowledge also makes it possible to question the epistemic hierarchies inherited from Western modernity (Santos, 2011), and pave the way for an "ecology of knowledge" capable of responding to the challenges of climate change, food security and environmental justice.
Thus, this symposium aims to question the theoretical, practical and political conditions for the valorization of local knowledge in the dynamics of the blue economy, through an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, anchored in African realities.
