Pluriversal Coastal Governance: Tenure, Citizenship, and Maritime Worlds
Convener: Dedi Adhuri
Co-convener: Ignatia Dyahapsari, Surya Tjandra
Over the past three decades, community-based coastal and marine management has become a central paradigm in both academic discourse and policy practice in Indonesia and beyond. Yet, much of this engagement continues to prioritize participation, local institutions, and cultural practices without sufficiently addressing two foundational dimensions: tenure as a structure of power and authority, and the plurality of maritime lifeworlds that challenge land-centric assumptions of governance, citizenship, and development.
This panel brings these dimensions together by positioning coastal and marine spaces as sites where tenure, citizenship, knowledge, and socio-cultural practices intersect. It foregrounds tenure systems—customary marine territories, access and exclusion rights, and locally grounded authority structures—not merely as technical or legal arrangements, but as central to questions of justice, legitimacy, and sustainability. At the same time, it engages a pluriversal perspective, recognizing that many coastal and maritime communities—such as the Sama Bajau and diverse seafaring societies across Indonesia—inhabit worlds that exceed the territorial, sedentary, and property-based assumptions of modern state governance.
Through this lens, the panel explores how amphibious and maritime lifeworlds, including boat-based dwelling, mobility, sailing traditions, and sea-oriented cosmologies, reshape understandings of governance, rights, and belonging. These lifeworlds are not remnants of the past, but active and adaptive systems through which communities negotiate contemporary transformations, including blue economy initiatives, marine conservation regimes, climate change, tourism, and infrastructural expansion.
By bringing together perspectives from anthropology, political ecology, legal studies, and maritime history, the panel aligns with the symposium’s emphasis on interdisciplinary, globally grounded, and socially relevant scholarship. It seeks to bridge empirical research and theoretical innovation with policy debates, highlighting the need for governance frameworks that are not only participatory, but also tenure-secure, epistemically inclusive, and responsive to diverse ways of being in and with the sea.
The panel invites contributions that address:
By moving beyond both technocratic governance models and romanticized narratives of community participation, this panel contributes to a more grounded and critical understanding of how tenure, culture, and pluriversal lifeworlds shape the possibilities and limits of coastal governance in a rapidly changing world.