Sustainable aquatic food systems sit at the intersection of human well-being and environmental governance, yet the social forces driving equitable transitions within these systems remain underserved in scholarship. While the overarching practice attempting to bridge conservation and economic growth is established, there is a need to bring attention to how exactly this bridge is constructed in practice. Specifically, because this depends heavily on the collective action of those whose livelihoods are most at stake.
This Research Topic calls for studies that foreground social movements and social mobilization as the primary catalysts for building resilient, inclusive, and sustainable aquatic food economies.
The focus of the issue is to move away from top-down manager-versus-user binaries. Instead, this collection explores how collective action, grassroots organizing, and community mobilization are actively reshaping marine, inland, and freshwater systems alike—encompassing small-scale fisheries, riverine food networks, and community-led aquaculture worldwide. Rather than advancing or arguing for a single new conceptual framework, we explicitly welcome diverse theoretical entries—including socio-technical transitions, social-ecological systems (SES), adaptive or interactive governance, food sovereignty, and indigenous sovereignty—to analyze how collective agency confronts climate change, structural inequality, and food insecurity.
We are especially interested in empirical and theoretical contributions emerging from, or conducted in close partnership with, social movements and mobilizing communities in the Global South.
Key Themes and Questions:
• Grassroots Governance & Mobilization: How do coastal, riverine, and inland social movements mobilize Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) to challenge exclusionary policy structures and build localized climate resilience?
• Mobilizing for Food Sovereignty: In what ways do community-led struggles and indigenous movements design, control, or appropriate digital tools and monitoring systems to assert data and food sovereignty?
• Inclusive Blue Economies from Below: How do small-scale aquatic food producers organize collectively to secure resource access rights, protect labour welfare, and counter capital-intensive, top-down blue economy agendas? Is there a blue economy grounded in blue ecology?
• Intersectional Mobilization & Well-being: How do gendered, caste, race, religion, or class-based collective actions within aquatic food systems mitigate slow-onset environmental disasters while ensuring local food and nutritional security?
Article types and fees
This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:
- Community Case Study
- Conceptual Analysis
- Data Report
- Editorial
- FAIR² Data
- FAIR² DATA Direct Submission
- General Commentary
- Hypothesis and Theory
- Methods
- … View all formats
Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.
Keywords: Aquatic Food systems, small-scale fisheries, inland fisheries, freshwater aquaculture, community-centred governance, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, co-management, blue economy, food sovereignty, climate resilience, Global South, indigenous communities, social equity, marine governance, food security, gender and fisheries, blue carbon, community-controlled data
Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
