One Ocean Hub
The One Ocean Hub and its arts-based community engagement component hosted at RU ELRC is a project that emerged from a link between the ISC T-learning project and the ISC ACKnowl-EJ project. The OOH is a large scale programme involving over 50 partners world-wide that aims to transform our response to the urgent challenges facing our ocean.
Its research aimed to bridge current disconnections in law, science and policy and integrate governance frameworks to balance multiple ocean uses with conservation. It strived to empower the communities, women and children, most reliant upon the oceans to inform decisions based on multiple values and knowledge systems. The Hub specifically addressed the challenges and opportunities of South Africa, Namibia, Ghana, Fiji and Solomon Islands, through collaborative research, breaking new grounds in the wider understanding of research for development, through innovative use of the arts and transdisciplinarity approaches.
The Hub gathered a community of scholars from 22 leading international Universities and Research Centres from the UK, South Africa, Ghana, Namibia, Kenya, the South Pacific and the Caribbean, led and hosted by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. This community worked together with 30+ Project Partners, including UN Agencies, regional intergovernmental organisations, national government departments, community representatives, NGOs, charities and media organisations.
As an independent programme for collaborative research for development, funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) through the Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), the Hub ran from March 2019 to March 2024. The community engagement component was led out of the Environmental Learning Research Centre at RU with award winning arts-based t-learning approaches to ocean governance emerging, such as the Empatheatre play Lalela Ulwandle. The RU ELRC were also leading the establishment of a Coastal Justice Network that produced ground-breaking outcomes for environmental law in South Africa.
Relevant links
The Coastal Justice Network website
UN World Oceans Week webinar on Small Scale Fishers and Ocean Well-Being
UN World Oceans Week webinar on ‘Indlela Yokuphila’
Storytelling as a political act – Empatheatre at the UN