Finally home from Brussels, after EU Ocean week - notebook full, mind still processing, basking in the motivational afterglow that inevitably follows this type of event.
It’s been so encouraging to witness the momentum building in this space, from the launch of Ocean Eye and push for Ocean Pact implementation to the impressive Mission Ocean and Waters projects and the futuristic solutions at Blue Invest.
Yet when it comes to strategic communications, a few underlying tensions are sitting with me:
We’re still operating in a blue bubble
The ocean isn’t a small niche. It is 90% of our biosphere, employs 133 million people, provides food security for 3 billion, and carries 80% of our goods. And it connects to everything on land.
Of course, it’s useful to discuss it in relative isolation at times - especially because of its regulatory peculiarities - but this constant “niche” framing can lull us into a false sense of consensus. Mainstreaming ocean thinking across policy, finance, and culture should be the main game.
The values being centered have shifted
Safety, security, strategic autonomy… these are the new emotional registers in the European context. And for good reason.
Communication strategies that stay anchored to yesterday’s emotional framing will quietly and quickly lose ground. Yet pivoting without totally de-centering our original reasoning is much easier said than done.
Resonance doesn’t “scale”
Efficiency is at the top of the mandate these days. But human nature just won’t comply. Sure, it would be ideal for a single narrative to move all EU citizens to protect the ocean, but relevance is context-dependent.
Instead of promoting “ocean literacy” as if it were a centralized set of one-size-fits-all commandments, we need interlocking campaigns that are culturally specific and co-created with the communities we aim to influence. Is this efficient? No. But it is effective.
The true bottleneck is trust, not awareness
The fastest way to lose a battle is to attack the wrong enemy. In the case of EU ocean comms, this false enemy is often “lack of information”.
If only [insert stakeholder group] knew about the importance of the ocean, we think, they would certainly support our actions. Meanwhile, research shows what’s driving the most skepticism about environmental action in Europe is not lack of problem knowledge - it’s political disaffection.
This means that even if we raise EU citizens’ concern about ocean health (which we are succeeding at), their civic engagement will likely be capped by their lack of belief in politicians’ ability to affect change.
Regaining this institutional trust requires finding innovative ways to speed up responsiveness and bring public concerns into policy debates in more ways than our routine stakeholder engagement.
The youth need this most
The generation that is set to inherit our exhausted ocean doesn’t really need to be made to care about our choices - they need to be handed the power to influence them.
There’s already so much progress we can learn from and be proud of. Still, the narratives that got us here won’t get us to 2030. Especially not in this right-trending, geopolitically rattled context.
Which is really all to say...
It’s time to ask more of ourselves. Consultation exercises and dissemination work packages are useful, but they can’t be the end-all, be-all of our ocean communications.
We need to burst our own bubble, trade control for learning, and co-create a semiotic framework that is strong enough to carry the weight of our collective ambitions.
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