14. Power, politics, and culture: The human dimensions of marine conservation technology
Lekelia D. Jenkins1
©2025 Lekelia D. Jenkins, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0395.14
Increasingly, governments are turning to technology to protect marine life and habitats. For examples, governments have passed legislation and implemented regulations that require the use of technology to reduce bycatch (i.e., the incidental capture of non-target species in fisheries). Mandated marine conservation technology use is at the intersection of science and governance. Ecological knowledge and engineering expertise are needed to create these technologies but the regulatory process often shortens the developmental process, resulting in technologies that are not well refined, fail to consider socio-cultural factors, and are impractical for everyday use. This chapter discusses how to better integrate science, especially social science, into the innovation process for marine conservation technologies and presents definitions and a framework for better conceptualizing the full management system in which marine conservation technologies operate.
Specifically, this chapter will discuss how the term conservation technology is applied widely and loosely to any technology connected to conservation. This overly broad understanding can lead to confusion around the actual mechanisms of conservation within a technological system, which can result in neglect and underdevelopment of the human dimensions of conservation technology, impacting its effectiveness. To improve understanding, this chapter offers precise definitions of marine conservation technology and a technological marine conservation system. It summarizes some of the concerns about the use of marine conservation technologies and discusses in depth how technology and technological systems can possess power of influence in and of themselves, as well as politics, and culture. It concludes by proposing a socio-ecological-technological systems framework to incorporate this broader understanding, so that the values and concerns of people, groups, and society are more effectively addressed in the creation and implementation of marine conservation technologies and technological marine conservation systems.
What is marine conservation technology?
History
While the term conservation technology originated in agricultural literature around techniques for soil conservation, Chopin and Inoue (1996a, 1996b) first used it in reference to marine conservation in 1996, to refer to technological approaches for reducing overfishing. Although marine conservation technology is a relatively new concept, its roots go back hundreds of years. Selective fishing to maximize exploitation and profit was the forerunner of marine conservation technology. Records of selective fishing practices date back several centuries, but concerted efforts of selective fishing in commercial fisheries notably increased at the end of the 19th century. This increased effort was initially motivated by exploitation, not conservation. This work focused on selecting large sizes of commercial fish by adjusting the shape and size of meshes and placing grids into the codends of trawls (Chopin, 1996a; Prado, 1997). Later, research sought to address the issue of separating species in multi-species fisheries. During the 1960s, rising public interest in charismatic species led to an increase in selectivity efforts for the purpose of conservation, and resulted in the development of capture prevention and escape technology for marine mammals, sea turtles, and seabirds beginning in the 1970s. Subsequently, researchers began exploring technologies that would increase the survival of organisms after interactions with fishing gear (Prado, 1997; Coe, 1984). Now, the term conservation technology is often indiscriminately applied to any technology however loosely connected to marine conservation (Berger‐Tal and Lahoz‐Monfort, 2018) and is in need of a precise definition.
Definition
The field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers a nuanced and socially contextualized understanding of technology in general. Some STS scholars define technology as a physical component with a practice (Pacey, 1983; Rogers, 1995). The physical component can be hardware, liveware, or both. Hardware consists of the tool that embodies the technology as a material or physical object (Rogers, 1995). Liveware is when a living thing is used as a tool in a technical process, such as biotechnologies or bacteria in sewage treatment (Pacey, 1983). In a marine conservation context, other examples would be biological control of invasive species through predator introductions or gene editing (Owens, 2017; Berger‐Tal and Lahoz‐Monfort, 2018). The practice component of technology is the information base for the tool such as software, philosophy, or process (Rogers, 1995). But more expansively, practice includes the organizational aspects (e.g., economic, regulatory, and professional activities; and users and consumers) and cultural aspects (e.g., goals, values, ethics) that create the system in which the technology operates, is supported, and constrained (Figure 14.1) (Pacey, 1983). In this broader sense, especially at industrialized scales, the technological practice is largely synonymous with a technological system. In sum, all technologies have a social component to some degree (Bergman et al., 2010).
Fig. 14.1 Diagrammatic restricted and broader definition of conservation technology (adapted from Pacey, 1983).
Within the conservation community, the current understanding of conservation technology is both wide and narrow. It is wide in that it encompasses most any technology that can aid conservation, even indirectly. An example is remote sensing and telemetry technologies (e.g., GPS, sensor tags, satellites, drones), which simply yield information but do not have a direct conservation function (Nyman, 2019). The current understanding is also narrow, because it focuses on high-tech devices (Berger‐Tal and Lahoz‐Monfort, 2018) and often overlooks simple technologies, such as separator grids or tori lines, that are not electronic or digital.
To differentiate and clarify the use of technology within marine conservation, I offer four terms: conservation function, conservation benefit, marine conservation technology, and technological marine conservation system. I will discuss how these terms can sharpen our understanding of the use, power, and impact of technology on nature and society and how this improved understanding can lead to better practice around conservation technologies.
I define conservation function as a purposeful design feature that is intended to yield a certain conservation outcome. I define conservation benefit as a positive conservation outcome. For example, a turtle excluder device (TED) is purposefully designed to remove endangered sea turtles from fishing nets and prevent the turtles from drowning. This is the conservation function of TEDs. When TEDs are used properly and widely throughout a fishery, sea turtle deaths decrease and the sea turtle population size increases. This positive conservation outcome is a conservation benefit of TEDs.
With the definitions of conservation function and conservation benefit in mind, I propose that marine conservation technology (MCT) is best understood as a tool that directly protects marine organisms and/or marine habitats (e.g., bycatch reduction devices). For an MCT, the conservation function is inherent to the tool. Although, like all tools, there is an associated practice, and in the case of MCT, the organization component can have a conservation function as well (Figure 14.2A). For other marine conservation approaches that incorporate technology, I propose the term technological marine conservation system (TMCS). For a TMCS, technology is used to contribute to a process of conservation, but the technology on its own cannot yield a conservation benefit (e.g., drones). In a TMCS, the technology does not have an inherent conservation function, rather the conservation function is embedded in the organizational component of the technology practice (Figure 14.2B). By its nature a TMCS is a technological system. MCTs, however, are usually incorporated into a technological system when being widely applied as a conservation solution or technological fix.
Fig. 14.2 Differences in location and nature of conservation function between A) marine conservation technologies and B) technological marine conservation systems.
The nature of MCTs versus TMCSs is important because it impacts their effectiveness as technological fixes for conservation problems. Sarewitz and Nelson (2008) offer three rules of technological fixes, which are: 1) the technology must largely embody the cause–effect relationship connecting a problem to its solution; 2) the effects of the technological fix must be assessable using relatively unambiguous or uncontroversial criteria (e.g., the conservation benefit must be easily observable); 3) research and development (R&D) is most likely to contribute decisively to solving a social problem when it focuses on improving a standardized technical core that already exists (Sarewitz and Nelson, 2008).
All three of these rules are more easily achieved with MCTs than with TMCSs. It is easier to obtain some level of conservation benefit from an MCT (i.e., rule 1), because the conservation function is inherent in the tool and the practice is more tightly bound to the technology. Also MCTs tend to evolve from existing technologies (i.e., rule 3) (Jenkins, 2006). In contrast, for a TMCS, the technology practice is more expansive and diffuse. In TMCSs, the practice and not the tool component of the technology embodies the cause-effect relationship (e.g., the conservation function). The conservation benefit is less easy to observe, and R&D must focus on the technology practice to develop conservation function and yield conservation benefit. However, we can move towards more effective TMCSs and also MCTs with increased awareness, broader understanding, and focused effort on developing the practice component. This could increase adoption of TMCSs and MCTs and also maximize conservation benefits (Bergman et al., 2010).
In the following sections, I will summarize some of the criticisms, concerns, and considerations for the use of MCTs, including halfway technology, techno-arrogance, and unintended consequences. I will briefly cover existing best practices for developing and promoting MCTs. Then, I will largely focus on how technology and technological systems possess power of influence in and of themselves, as well as politics, culture, and organization. Incorporating this broader understanding can help us develop and implement MCTs and TMCSs that are more effective by addressing a range of critical values and concerns. This can potentially be achieved through the better integration of social sciences into MCT and TMCS development and the application of the Social-Ecological-Technological Systems framework.
Pitfalls
In comparison to non-technological management options, such as time/area closures, conservation technology as a technological fix often requires fewer changes in the behavior of the resource users (Sarewitz and Nelson, 2008). An excellent example is the use of acoustic pingers to alert cetaceans and prevent their entanglement in gillnets; fishers, managers, and scientists supported this technology (Kraus, Read, et al., 1997). A difficulty with conservation technology is that consensus among typically factious groups might drive a management decision that does not adequately resolve the problem or may even create new problems.
Halfway technology
In the excitement of discovery, conservation technologies can be subject to unrealistic expectations and misapplications, and this has led to some criticism (Frazer, 1992; Meffe, 1992). Frazer (1992) points out that some technological fixes are “halfway technologies”, i.e., technologies that address the symptoms of a problem but not the cause of the problem. Frazer backs his argument with the example of a misguided TMCS involving sea turtle captive breeding, hatcheries, and head-starting programs. Sea turtle hatcheries are facilities that house and protect sea turtle eggs that have been removed from wild nesting beaches. Headstarting programs raise the resulting hatchlings until they are juveniles and have outgrown many of their natural predators. The misguided TMCS used these approaches attempted to address the symptom of the declining turtle populations, rather than the cause, bycatch and disorienting beach lighting. The better solutions were to use turtle excluder devices (TEDs) to reduce the deaths of large juvenile and adult sea turtles in shrimp trawl nets and to use low-pressure sodium lighting on beaches to prevent disorientation of nesting females and natural hatchings. TEDs consist of a hard grid or mesh panel that is placed in a trawl net to direct sea turtles and other large objects out of an escape hole in the net. Unlike captive breeding, hatcheries, and head-starting, TEDs and low-pressure sodium lighting would directly address the causes of sea turtle mortality.
Meffe (1992) illustrated the concept of halfway technologies with an overview of salmon conservation. For instance, dams blocking salmon rivers are a major cause of declining salmon populations; a symptom of this problem is that fewer salmon can return to their home streams to breed. In most cases, managers have chosen not to address the problem (i.e., the dam), but instead to address the symptom (i.e., low numbers of spawning fish) by artificially increasing salmon numbers through hatcheries.
Halfway technologies can be seductive, yet dangerous. Sometimes halfway technologies are the only options available, such as using cold medicine to treat symptoms because a vaccine against the cold virus does not exist. Or, with the complexities of conservation, sometimes a halfway technology is a compromise around the only socio-politically feasible resolution. The problem is that, like cold medicine, often people will not be aware that the resolution is a halfway technology and thus does not truly and permanently solve the issue. In tension-filled political and governance structures, halfway technologies can be a way to appear to be addressing a problem without requiring significant change in the behavior of stakeholders. The danger is that this can expend political will and public attention so that people move away from the issue before the problem is truly solved. Moreover, halfway technologies—and technological fixes in general—cannot offer moral absolution to problems that humans and society have caused. A technological fix, even an effective one, does not release us from the blame and ethical obligation to make amends (Sarewitz and Nelson, 2008; Frazer, 1992).
Techno-arrogance and related concepts
Meffe (1992) also argues that people have developed a “techno-arrogance”, which is the failure to recognize or accept limitations and ramifications of the attempted control through technology of our human environment and of nature. He states that:
humankind has adopted a shortsighted and ultimately self-defeating philosophy toward nature and our modification of it. We seem to feel that we can solve any man-induced problem in the natural world, be it habitat destruction, the spread of exotic species […] and even global climate change, through even further modifications using a concerted application of technology. The notion is that we can right virtually any wrong, given enough money, motivation, and innovation. And if any of those “solutions” cause unanticipated problems, simply apply more technology (Meffe, 1992, p. 351).
Meffe explains this idea with the example of the use of hatcheries to recover Pacific salmon populations without addressing the on-going overfishing and habitat destruction that originally caused the crisis. These hatcheries have also created other problems, such as negative effects on the genetics of natural salmon populations, water pollution, and habitat alteration (Meffe, 1992).
The concept of techno-arrogance is closely related to techno-optimism, techno-addiction, and the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP). Techno-optimism is “an exaggerated and unwarranted belief in human technological abilities to solve problems of unsustainability while minimizing or denying the need for large-scale social, economic and political transformation” (Barry, 2012). Techno-optimism has been raised as an issue for the use of drones, automated identification system (AIS), and satellite surveillance to combat piracy and illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing (Nyman, 2019). Techno-addiction is the societal obsession with technologies that are illusory solutions to problems that are fundamentally social, psychological, or spiritual in nature (Huesemann and Huesemann, 2011). HEP is a worldview that justifies human dominance over nature through the use of technology, based on the belief that humans are unique compared to other organisms, independent from nature, and can solve any problem with human ingenuity (Gardezi and Arbuckle, 2018; Williams, 2007). HEP, Techno-arrogance, techno-optimism, or techno-addiction can lead to recklessly embracing the benefits of MCTs and TMCSs without addressing environmental, societal and other associated risks. This then may lead to problems that further innovation cannot solve and society and nature may be left to suffer the consequences.
Unintended consequences
Often people label these consequences as unintended. There are several types of unintended consequences, including unexpected benefits (i.e., a positive unplanned result), unexpected drawbacks (i.e., a negative unplanned result), and perverse outcomes (i.e., a result contrary to what was intended). For instance, in Ecuador, an organization promoted the use of circle hooks to reduce sea turtle mortality in fisheries, a move that resulted in an unexpected drawback. The fishers perceived that the hooks also increased the capture of profitable sharks, which the fishers could not legally target but could land and sell if they were captured incidentally. So, some fishers started using circle hooks not to protect sea turtles but to capture imperiled sharks (Jenkins et al., 2012b, 2012a).
Some scholars argue that the term unintended consequences is a misnomer (Jasanoff, 2016; Winner, 1986). Jasanoff (2016) contends that consequences are foreseeable and that people, businesses, and society would rather not foresee them, so they place inadequate effort into considering consequences. Winner (1986) claims that the process of innovation is biased in favor of certain social interests, resulting in technologies that inequitably benefit and harm different segments of society. For the everyday person, our values and cultural norms greatly influence our thinking and thus the technologies we produce and use. It is unlikely that, without special training, adequate resources, and motivation, the average innovator or user would anticipate anything but the most obvious consequences. However, Jasanoff and Winner reason that with social and political will and a “moral and political language” for discussing and evaluating technologies, many consequences of the uses of technology could be anticipated and preemptively addressed.
Power, politics, culture, and organization
We often mistakenly believe that the same MCT can be used anywhere in the world and yield the same conservation benefit. We frequently restrict the list of things that can influence the function of an MCT to a small number of external factors, such as the need for similar fishing gear types, species assemblages, or benthic habitat types. However, inherent to MCTs is not only conservation function, but also power, politics and the culture of the inventor and the place where it was created and intended for use. Furthermore, while the same physical technology may be transported and applied around the world, the people who use or experience it differ in where and how they live, how they support their families, what they believe and value, their education and wealth, and their societal freedoms.
Power, politics, culture, and organization may be external components to the physical technology, but they are still an inherent component of the technology (Barry, 2012; Jasanoff, 2016; Pacey, 1983; Winner, 1986). A useful analogy would be the dependence of the human body on air, food, and water. Air, food, and water are external to the human body, but inherently necessary, because without them the body dies. If these things are poisoned the body is poisoned. With society’s tendency to divide, categorize, and narrowly define much of the natural world, we view these things as separate from the body, as associated and important, but not a connected component of the body. Likewise, I suggest a narrow definition is a root cause of problems with the invention and adoption of conservation technologies. I propose that we need to radically change our understanding of technology. Power, politics, culture, and organization are not peripheral to technical matters. Rather power, politics, culture, organization and technical matters are interdependent systems that must all work together to form a successful conservation technology. Adopting a holistic definition of conservation technology is the first step to a holistic approach to inventing and promoting the use of MCTs and TMCSs. That process of invention and innovation is not only technological but must be social as well.
The transition from unsustainability is one in which innovation is absolutely vital, and that includes technological innovation. But it also requires and involves what might be called “full-spectrum innovation”; new ways of doing, collaborating, governing, and thinking at different scales and in different places. It requires, in short, social innovation, which is much more difficult, longer term and more uncertain than the easier and less uncertain path of technological innovation (though of course, this path is not without risks).
This interaction between technology, people and society is a critical consideration in obtaining conservation benefits from MCTs and especially TMCS. In creating them, the field of marine conservation must begin to attend to the human and societal aspects of technology as much as they attend to engineering aspects and ecological impacts. In the words of the STS scholar, Sheila Jasanoff, “new and emerging technologies redraw the boundaries between self and other and nature and artifice. Technological inventions penetrate our bodies, mind, and social interactions, altering how we relate to others both human and nonhuman.”(Jasanoff 2016) The redrawing of boundaries and the alteration of nature and society will flow from the creation and use of MCTs and TMCS, so we must actively and consciously engage in shaping these boundaries and guiding these alterations.
Power
Technology has power. Technology has the power to shape nature, to shape society, and to shape us. Technology has the power and authority to rule and govern us (Jasanoff, 2016). Jasanoff uses the example of traffic lights, which have the authority to tell us when we can legally stop and go. In Baltimore City, an audit of speed cameras found that they had an average error rate over 10% (Broadwater and Calvert, 2014). The technology system metes out judgements and, regardless of whether that judgement is correct or incorrect, a bill for the fine comes in the mail. There is no immediate opportunity to plead your case with a police officer and perhaps avoid a ticket. Similarly, researchers touted that they had achieved proof of concept for how to use remote sensing and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify fishing boats that might be using forced labor (McDonald et al., 2021). However, other researchers quickly responded that the model and how it was tested was flawed, and could lead to the misidentification of vessels that are not engaged in forced labor abuses (Swartz et al., 2021). They argued that scientists should not be so quick to embrace technologies that could shape policy and practices that impact human lives.
MCTs and TMCSs also have power. With this power comes concerns for how MCTs and TMCSs, such as those that harness AI, are reshaping decision-making and enforcement processes, making these processes less transparent and participatory, and shifting the distribution of power among stakeholders to favor the developers of MCTs and TMCSs (Scoville et al., 2021). An example is the current development of autonomous vessels to police marine protected areas (MPAs). These vessels use AI to patrol MPAs, identify the presence of vessels, whether or not they are just transiting through or engaging in a prohibited practice like fishing, and documenting their presence and activity with video and GPS. Currently, government lawyers and conservation and enforcement experts are trying to determine if evidence gathered from autonomous vessels would be admissible in court (Minke-Martin 2020). While this TMCS has great potential to patrol large MPAs that are prohibitively expensive to police with typical crewed boats, there are also concerns around power that must be considered. What if a fisher was fishing just outside of park boundaries, suffered a power loss and drifted into park boundaries with their fishing gear in the water? In California, having gear in the water inside of an MPA is grounds for prosecution (Minke-Martin, 2020). As with the traffic cameras, there is no one to whom to explain your circumstances before being identified as a law-breaker.
Autonomous vessels also have the power to potentially increase the wealth and power divide and worsen disparities in access to resources and opportunities. MPAs often tout the creation of local jobs as guardians for the MPA as a direct benefit to the local community. Would autonomous vessels take these jobs? In many developing countries, basic human necessities like food, clean water, decent work, healthcare, and education outweigh fisheries enforcement as a priority. Considering these other issues, some developing countries cannot afford even basic skiffs for patrolling, so purchasing an autonomous vehicle would not be fiscally feasible. Even if they had the vessels, these same countries often lack the scientific resources and manpower to analyze all the data these vessels would produce (Nyman, 2019). Could this disparity lead to displacement of IUU fishing? Will the use of autonomous vessels in wealthy countries push industrial scale IUU fishing into the waters of developing countries and cost their people precious resources? These are valid questions given concerns that current trade-based measures to combat IUU fishing amplify inequities to the detriment of countries dependent on small-scale fisheries (Song et al., 2020).
As we develop MCTs and TMCSs we must grapple with these issues. We must ask ourselves: Who or what is at risk? Who is responsible for risk? How do we foresee risk? How can we prevent widening wealth, power, resource, and opportunity gaps (Jasanoff, 2016)? While designing the conservation function of MCTs and TMCSs, we must actively design the other aspects of the technological system to address these questions.
Politics
Technology has politics. According to the seminal work of Langdon Winner, “The issues that divide or unite people in society are settled not only in the institutions and practices of politics proper, but also, and less obviously, in tangible arrangements of steel and concrete, wires and semiconductors, nuts and bolts.” Winner supports this declaration with multiple examples, including the classic case of Robert Moses (Winner, 1986). From the 1920s to the 1970s, Robert Moses was the master builder of roads, parks, bridges, and other public works in New York City. He was also racially prejudiced and biased along the lines of social class. He intentionally engineered 200 overpasses in Long Island with only nine feet of clearance to allow cars but not buses to pass. Thus, he gave access to recreational areas, such as Jones Beach, to car-owning, middle-class or better, primarily white people, while effectively excluding access to lower-class and minority people who rode buses. “His monumental structures of concrete and steel embody a systematic social inequality, a way of engineering relationships among people” that still persists long after his death (Winner, 1986).
While Moses intentionally embedded politics—and injustice—into his constructions to achieve political ends, purposeful intent is not needed for technologies to have politics. Until the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, people with disabilities were excluded from many aspects of public life, because of neglect. Architects, designers, and engineers neglected to consider the needs of people with disabilities when creating buildings, transportation systems, and communication systems (Winner, 1986). Subsequently, these were and are being redesigned and rebuilt, illustrating that, with political will, even major technologies and technological systems can be reworked to remove injustices embedded within them.
Winner shows that technologies can be political in two ways. First, they can be inherently political, such as with nuclear power that requires a complex system to manage the hazardous, weaponizable substances needed to create it and produced by it. These inherently political technologies tend to be part of large, sophisticated technological systems that typically depend on centralized, hierarchical structures for management and control (Winner, 1986). Notably, many in the environmental movement are skeptical of this type of technological system, because it could undermine efforts to democratize society and science (Barry, 2012). This could potentially reduce the ability and tendency of technological systems to incorporate considerations of power, politics, culture and organization. Second, technologies can be political in cases where the invention, design, or arrangement of a technology or technical system is used to resolve an issue within a community, such as curb cuts and other accommodations for people with disabilities.
Like the examples provided by Winner, MCTs and TMCSs also can have politics. An MCT is usually adopted at personal cost for the common good, especially in fisheries. Fishers bear a personal financial and time cost of purchasing, maintaining, and using MCTs to protect aspects of the marine environment, such as marine mammals, sea turtles, and seabirds, for the common good of the public that treasures these animals. The common good is expressed through laws, rules, and regulations, which by their nature are political. Ensuring compliance to these regulations requires a political system of monitoring and enforcement (Jenkins, 2006; Eayrs, Pol, and Kraan, 2019). Furthermore, the general study and practice of marine conservation is often political and this can result in MCTs and TMCSs that are political intentionally or from lack of attentiveness to broader implications.
One instance of an MCT system that was political through lack of attentiveness was the use of circle hooks to prevent the bycatch of sea turtles in Ecuador (Jenkins et al., 2012b, 2012a). The designers of the circle hooks made them out of stainless steel to prevent rust and corrosion. Neither the designers of circle hooks nor of the system for introducing and promoting the use of circle hooks in Ecuador considered the political implications of steel in that country. Ecuador does not manufacture steel, so to protect its domestic markets there is a tariff on the importation of steel products. The need to import hooks meant that fishing gear suppliers would need to buy circle hooks in large quantities. This coupled with the tariffs made the costs of circle hooks too high for the suppliers and their customers, the fishers. In retrospect, from its inception the MCT system should have included a mechanism to negotiate with the Ecuadorian government for a tariff exemption for circle hooks. To avoid future problems like this one, it is critical that the evaluation of MCTs and TMCS goes beyond the obvious uses of a tool to include a “moral and political language” for evaluation. We need to understand the broader implications of the design of MCTs and arrangement of TMCSs (Winner, 1986).
MTCs and TMCSs can be inherently political or a way of settling a political issue. For example, with the passing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act and Endangered Species Act, the bycatch of dolphins and sea turtles became a political concern. In response, scientists, engineers, and fishers created MCTs like the Medina Panel and the turtle excluder device (TED) to help dolphins and sea turtles escape from fishing nets (Jenkins, 2007; Jenkins, 2010). These technologies settled much of the concern around dolphin and sea turtle bycatch. Subsequently, the United States passed a law requiring the use of TEDs in fisheries around the world that exported seafood to the United States. The technological system for implementing this law was large, complex, and political, because it was necessary for engaging and negotiating with other governments to implement a U.S. law in sovereign waters of foreign nations (Senko, Jenkins, and Peckham, 2017; Benaka, Cimo, and Jenkins, 2012). The technological system for international use of TEDs is an example of an inherently political MCT system.
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, societies choose structures for technologies that influence how people work, communicate, travel, and consume. Over the course of these decisions, different people are positioned differently and possess unequal degrees of power and information. In cases of inherently political technologies, the need to keep the large, complex technological system functioning is often prioritized over other moral or political concerns (Winner, 1986). For example, in the case of international use of TEDs, the United States initially recognized that different countries had different capacities for implementing and enforcing the use of TEDs. So, the United States gave more flexibility to some nations, especially developing nations, in how quickly and fully they became compliant with the regulations on TED use. This prompted other nations to sue the United States through the World Trade Organization, forcing the United States to treat every country the same, regardless of wealth or capacity (Brotmann, 1999; DeSombre and Barkin, 2002). The result was a MCT system that was equal but not equitable, because the full cost of complying with the regulations was more burdensome for developing countries.
Culture and organization
Technology has culture and organization. The practice component of technology houses many of the cultural and organizational elements. In comparison, the physical component may be more culturally neutral but not perfectly so. To be useful, technology must be a part of life. It must fit into a certain pattern of activities, lifestyles and values, such as practical uses, status symbols, required supporting technology and infrastructure, and required skills and expertise (Pacey, 1983).
To illustrate the idea that technology has culture, Arnold Pacey uses the example of snowmobiles. Snowmobiles became a commercial success in the 1970s as a recreational vehicle marketed to wealthy white people. The design of the machine was intended for brief periods of use in relatively balmy winter conditions, reflecting the purpose of recreation and the values of the target customer. However, indigenous people in artic regions saw the potential of the snowmobile as a work vehicle. To achieve this potential, they had to reinvent (i.e., undertake a process of modification and reengineering) the snowmobile to carry extra fuel for long trips, hold tools for emergency repairs, and have capacity to haul cargo and tow sleds. They also had to provide shelters to keep snowmobiles warm so the machines would start in the extreme cold. The history of the snowmobile is an example of how “a machine designed in response to the values of one culture needed a great deal of effort to suit the purposes of another” (Pacey, 1983).
Further evidence that conservation technologies change in different settings can be found in the impact of cultural and organizational changes on the technical components of conservation technologies. There is great diversity within the U.S. shrimp trawl fishery. As TEDs were implemented in various segments of the shrimp fishery and in various other fisheries, the structure of the device changed; for instance, the dimensions of the grid or the width of bar spacing. These changes did not happen spontaneously, nor were they purely related to mechanical or biological problem solving. These changes in the structure of the device precipitated from the changes in cultural and organizational setting. For example, bycatch of juvenile red snapper was a concern for some stakeholders, especially for the Florida shrimp fishery. This concern about red snapper was a value, an element of the cultural component, and specific to only a portion of the shrimp fishery. To address this value, the federal government scientists and Sea Grant extension agents worked to create TEDs that maximized the reduction of finfish bycatch. In other segments of the U.S. shrimp trawl fishery, especially along the East Coast, shrimpers wanted to keep some of the flatfish bycatch, because they could sell certain species, such as flounder, and increase their fishing profit (Jenkins, 2012). Once again, this value impacted the types of TEDs that gear researchers tried to develop.
In essence, changing the practice associated with an established conservation technology makes it a new technology and creates a new technological system. When the Australian shrimp trawl industry began using a U.S.-designed TED, it was vastly more effective in protecting sea turtles in Australia, because of the high level of willing adoption. The technical components of the TED were unchanged from that used by the U.S. industry, but the cultural and organizational components were very different (Tucker, Robins, and McPhee, 1997). The shrimp trawl fleet in Australia was smaller, the boats larger, and the profit per boats greater than in the United States. TEDs were a relatively smaller expense for the Australian shrimp trawl industry, so the fishing organizations supported their use. The success of TEDs in Australia is intrinsically tied to the values of the shrimpers and the activities of the organizations involved in the use of TEDs. These things, in fact, defined the application of TEDs in Australia; it is not a definition that could be transplanted somewhere else, and so TEDs became a different technology when used in Australia.
If the cultural and organizational components change, the conservation technology and technological systems would be different—even if the technical components remain unchanged. This means that a conservation technology becomes a new thing simply by being applied in a new setting. If you attempt to separate the cultural and organization components from the technology, or simply neglect them, then the MCT or TMCS will likely have less or no conservation function, resulting in fewer or no conservation benefits (Jenkins, 2006).
Marine Social-Ecological-Technological Systems
I have shown how essential aspects of MCTs and TMCSs have been neglected, namely power, politics, culture, and organization. These are just a few prominent examples of human and societal dimensions of technology that must be considered in the creation, implementation, and use of MCTs and TMCSs. Unfortunately, in comparison to technological innovation, social, cultural, and political innovations are often undervalued to the point of being discriminated against in receiving government funding and resources (Barry, 2012; Bergman et al., 2010). Further, more fully exploring and incorporating these dimensions requires the expertise of marine social scientists. However, marine social science is often underutilized, marginalized, and disempowered within the field of marine conservation, which often gives supremacy and privilege to natural science (Aswani et al., 2018). A more interdisciplinary approach to the innovation of environmental technologies that includes social scientists, historians, philosophers, and humanists is needed. Moreover, we need a transdisciplinary approach that empowers end users, citizens, and stakeholders in the innovation and evaluation of environmental technologies (Barry, 2012). This can lead to bottom-up innovation by civil society and user-led innovation, which can result in contextually appropriate technologies that integrate social, cultural, and organizational concerns (Bergman et al., 2010; Ornetzeder and Rohracher, 2006).
The Social-Ecological Systems (SES) framework has sought to bridge these divides, especially between natural and social sciences. But some social scientists find this framework lacking, because of disciplinary differences in understandings of core concepts such as system boundaries, self-organization, function, and a failure to take up other important concepts like agency, conflict, knowledge, and power (Aswani et al., 2018). SES also relegates technology to a sub-element of the social component in the framework and is frequently overlooked, even though technology has great agency (Markolf et al., 2018; Ahlborg et al., 2019). Arguably, in the Anthropocene, the technologies we create are powerful actors that are shaping nature and society (Jasanoff, 2016; Ahlborg et al., 2019; Markolf et al., 2018). As a solution, some scholars have proposed combining of the fields of STS and SES (Ahlborg et al., 2019). This led to the Social-Ecological-Technological Systems (SETS) framework.
The SETS framework recognizes the agency of each component: social, ecological, and technological (Figure 14.3). The framework is predicated on an understanding that the components interact, are dependent upon, and have influence over each other. While the ecological system could rationally exist without the others, this is rarely the case in the Anthropocene. Humans impact nearly every corner of the natural world and increasingly must manage it to sustain it. The social system (people, societies, governance, livelihoods values etc.) is dependent on the ecological system to provide the resources for sustenance, shelter, recreation, and ecosystem services. The social system also leverages the technological system to its advantage to the extent that the social system is dependent on the technological system.
Within the SETS framework, scholars recognize technology as the frequent intermediary between the social and ecological components of the SETS (Markolf et al., 2018; Ahlborg et al., 2019). Technology is the means for obtaining and enhancing resources from the ecological system for the benefit and protection of the social system, for example energy systems or flood mitigation. Technology is also the conduit through which the social system most impacts the ecological system in the form of pollution, habitat degradation, and overexploitation. Further, most human interactions with the marine environment depend on technology.
Fig. 14.3 Overview of social, ecological, and technological components and interactions of marine SETSs (adapted from Markolf et al., 2018).
The fields of urban ecology and infrastructure systems have begun to take up the SETS framework, but marine conservation has yet to do so (Grimm et al., 2017; Markolf et al., 2018; Ahlborg et al., 2019). The current approaches in marine conservation are inadequate for fully understanding the human and societal dimensions and implications of MCTs and TMCSs. If we are to advance in creating technologies and technological systems that help address conservation problems more holistically without creating additional problems, the SETS framework is a promising avenue to explore. It could serve as a boundary object around which researchers from various disciplines, including fields of social science, can contribute their necessary knowledge and expertise. It could also be used as a lens to more fully consider all relevant aspects of MCTs and TMCSs, such as politics, power, culture, and organization. This then could expand and democratize who creates MCTs and TMCSs. It could transform how we create them, through context-based approaches and re-envisioned goals (Ahlborg et al., 2019). As the Americans with Disabilities Act led to transportation and communication systems being redesigned and rebuilt to remove embedded injustices, we can begin to transform how we conceive of MCTs and TMCSs. Marine conservation can move towards technologies and technological systems that explicitly and inclusively engage with the social elements that are embedded with them and the social systems in which they are situated. And in so doing, we can design a conservation function that is better suited to the social context, and this in turn will allow us to reap more conservation benefits.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I presented a formal definition of marine conservation technology that ties the function of the technology to direct conservation outcomes. I also differentiated MCT from a technological marine conservation system. In a TMCS, the technology does not have an inherent conservation function, rather the conservation function is embedded in the organizational component of the technology practice. I discussed how inappropriate development and use of marine conservation technologies can lead to halfway technologies, techno-arrogance, and unintended consequences. I delved into how technology and technological systems can have power, politics, and culture. This awareness of the socio-cultural elements of technology is critical when governments are considering implementing MCTs that were developed elsewhere. Awareness of these elements are prerequisites for properly adapting technologies and technological systems to suite new contexts. I conclude by proposing the Social-Ecological-Technological Systems framework, so that the values and concerns of people, groups, and society are more effectively addressed in the creation and implementation of MCTs and TMCSs. The takeaway message is that MCTs and TMCSs are not just engineered mechanisms to address ecological problems, but they are also socio-cultural solutions. Any attempt to use technology to govern or manage a marine conservation issue must account for the social-cultural context, and a framework like SETS helps support the better integration of natural science, social science, engineering, and governance.
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1 School for the Future of Innovation in Society, College of Global Futures, Arizona State University, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2375-2032