“Still, scientists must be aware of the culture of the people they work with and their perspectives and needs regarding these fisheries if we are to be successful in contributing to fishery management policies.”
Robby Thigpen – Marine Conservation without Borders See page 3
What is our approach?
In its simplest terms, our approach is about delivering information in terms meaningful to targeted audiences. We develop collaborative partnerships across national borders and professional and academic specializations. There is an opportunity to improve the way scientific knowledge and messages can be more accessible to everyday folks. If meaningful communication of basic foundational principles and concepts can be established through culturally relevant examples and linguistically relevant media, conversations and understanding may be more productive and beneficial, both for the everyday folks and the scientific communities interested in advancing knowledge or informing policy.
We design our projects to instill the values and behaviors of conservation to promote lasting fishing livelihoods and marine ecosystems. Our goal is to overcome cultural and linguistic boundaries by “putting things in local terms”. Using locally appropriate languages will increase the likelihood of messages to take hold, having an impact across nations and communities throughout the Caribbean and beyond. The generous contributions of our collaborators will undoubtedly return equally significant and valuable results for the people and marine ecologies in the Caribbean and around the world.
At Marine Conservation without Borders, our priority is making marine science concepts and principles of conservation relevant and accessible to the people who use and derive livelihoods from the marine environment. The projects in which we engage make it real for local folks by delivering scientific messages in local languages using both local and scientific taxonomic descriptions. We look beyond the national borders laid across these shared resources to consider ecosystems in their whole within nations and between them. Each project will be marked with recognizable local voices in languages spoken by partner communities and their local audiences.
Thomas Dean King, PhD – Marine Conservation without Borders
