Designing knowledge-sharing platforms for energy justice: the case of marine renewable energy on Asian and North American coasts

How can we expand marine renewable energy technologies wisely, without grossly abusing environmental justice principles? What kind of knowledge co-production is suited to handling policy questions around emergent green technologies? This chapter uses the case of marine renewables to explore the potential and limits of critical making, particularly of digital citizen science platforms.
Marine Renewable Energy (MRE) technologies are being heavily promoted on European, Asian and American seaboards. These new ocean infrastructures are set to become a key part of sustainable energy transformations. Yet decades of experience with solar and wind parks have shown that green energy technologies are often beset with social and environmental justice concerns. We therefore need to study the impact of marine renewables being established on global coasts with a methodology that actively brings academic research in to support resilient, socially-acceptable MRE design and deployment. As a collaborative ethnographic study, Social Ocean Energy seeks to intervene in environmental justice processes (Pellow 2018, Schlosberg 2007) around emerging blue economies.
Environmental co-management principles emphasize the need for structured forums of voicing and interacting between different experiences to build trust, alliances with shared goals, and to resolve conflicts. To this end, new techno-social configurations are emerging, including digital platforms for collaborative and civic science (Fortun et al. 2021, Wylie and Albright 2014, Wilson and MacDonald 2018). As we negotiate political and economic arenas towards a livable planet, we therefore need to better understand their potential, risks and limitations. This paper unpacks these issues, using the experience of the Social Ocean Energy since 2024.