Stakeholder-driven Participatory Management Highlighted through Case Studies

Worldwide, coral reef management is increasingly becoming more participatory and drawing on adaptive management. As a reminder, participatory management refers to a form of management that shares the authority and responsibility of managing natural resources between the government and local communities and stakeholder groups (Kar, 2021). An important aspect is that it incorporates participatory governance which promotes and empowers the people (citizens and non-citizens alike) to participate in the decision-making process (). Often, only entities that significantly affect or are significantly affected by the proposed decision participate. Throughout this book, we’ve defined these entities as stakeholders (Decker et al., 2012). Our five case studies showcased stakeholder-driven policy-making at the national level through bipartisan legislation in the United States, at the sub-national level through participatory management in Florida, and at the local level through grassroots movements in Florida and the Cayman Islands, with Florida reefs depicted in Figure 10.1.

Our case study on bipartisan legislation in the United States showed that Republicans and Democrats are using coral reefs as symbols in policy-making to collaborate and cooperate on legislation regarding climate-vulnerable ecosystems and the impacts from climate change. For example, coral reefs are symbols of the unique cultural settings of American states across the nation. For Hawaii and Florida, coral reefs represent unique identities and are tied to their livelihoods and way of life. We also find that there is bipartisan consensus on the need to protect and conserve coral reef ecosystems through community-based management programs funded and supported by the federal government. This means that Congressional leaders are buying into the importance of enabling local communities to play a role in stewarding their coral reefs.

Our case study on the management of Florida's coral reefs examined two organizations: the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) and the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative (SEFCRI). We found that both organizations enacted participatory management styles via stakeholder engagement and involvement. We also found evidence of iteratively learning, or learning as they go, from both organizations, indicating adaptive management strategies. Finally, we identified that the FKNMS engages in a formal and centralized approach to managing the Florida Reef Tract, while SEFCRI engages in an informal and collaborative approach to managing Florida's northern reefs.

For Françoise

In the meantime, an experimental Canadian filmmaker, Kirk Tougas, found the trailer for a film by Michael Winner starring Charles Bronson, The Mechanic (1972), worked on it until he gave it back its soul, added a critical preamble and entitled his polemical essay The Politics of Perception (1973). It was a good trailer: full of cinematic metaphors about erasure (still camera viewfinders and guns, photocopiers, photos, the body defined as material and human beings as machines…). Like lightning to a tree, it attracted the murderous treatment to which Kirk Tougas submitted it.

Tougas loops the entire trailer some twenty times, washing away a little more of the image and sound with each pass. At first imperceptible, the chromatic and sonic erasure speeds up, the loss of definition becomes exhaustive and the iconography typical of action films opens the field to a shadowy combat between figurative destruction and plastic abstraction. The image becomes earthy, then ashen, marbled, mottled and flecked. In the end, there is nothing more than a white screen and a sonic veil analogous to a beating heart.

African American women are one of the oppressed groups of humanity who suffer from triple jeopardy. They suffer because of their race, gender, and class. As they are black, they suffer because of their race and have been forced to believe that if you are white, you are right, if you are black, stay back and have been discarded from the mainstream life in the United States even today. Moreover, they have been forced to believe that this is the man's world and the woman's place is in home.

In her book, The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir has written about humanity. She has written, “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as a relative to him, she is not regarded as an autonomous being …. He is the absolute, she is the other …. Man sets himself up as the essential as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object” (16–17). This kind of objectification or commodification of women is being created by men so that they can enjoy the upper hand over women.

African American women are the victims of racism, sexism, and poverty. Moreover, they were also denied to have access to knowledge and knowledge-generating enterprises because of their race, gender, and poverty. The African people were brought to America as slaves and were sold on auction blocks to the highest white bidder. As they were sold as slaves, their humanity was taken away from them. The position of enslaved African women was worse than that of men as every kind of liberty was taken with them by the white masters.

However, after the abolition of slavery and the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments made to the constitution of the United States, they started gaining their humanity and access to knowledge and knowledge-generating enterprises. As a result, they started to read and write whatever they wanted to read and write in their own limited capacity. In due course of time, they also started to write autobiographies, poems, short stories, novels, and plays too. The autobiography was one of the basic literary forms which was handled by both African American men and women. Though late, plays were also written by them in due course of time.

Data analysis provided by Research Assistant Kampol Pannoi

In 2021, a group of prominent Democratic and Republican lawmakers from the bicameral U.S. legislature, or Congress, came together to call for new policy to defend American coral reefs from environmental change. In the words of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, “I saw the devastated condition of our coral reefs firsthand when touring the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and I promised a comprehensive response.” His perceptions on stressors to reefs and the need for their proposed policy, the Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, was nearly indistinguishable from his Democratic colleagues. Given how polarized American politics have been for the past decade, it is important to understand why lawmakers come together and agree upon the urgent need to protect coral reefs from stressors? Is there something inherently special to coral reefs that causes elected leaders to put aside typical partisan grudges and work together to ensure laws are passed to guarantee American reefs survive the era of climate change?

This chapter will review the history of coral reef policy in the U.S. Congress, including a focus on policies that had congressional support from both political parties, and a specific case of reauthorizing the fundamental coral reef conservation law in the United States. We argue that understanding why legislators decide to place coral reefs on the policy-making agenda is important for biodiversity conservation, but may also be a source of common ground over more contentious issues, such as the passing of climate change legislation. Our results can help interest groups message the importance of biodiversity and climate policy to lawmakers in a way that appeals to a range of political ideologies.

History of Coral Reef Policy in the U.S. Congress

The federal government of the United States is broken up into three branches of government: the Executive Branch, which is where the president and federal agencies carry out laws; the Legislative Branch, where laws are made in Congress; and the Judicial Branch, where laws are judged based on whether they follow the U.S. constitution. Congress is made up of two chambers or houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is the lower house, which is generally characterized by early career politicians with more frequent elections every two years who represent a district within a U.S. state based on population.

Imagine the hustle and bustle of downtown Miami, teeming with live music, filled with flavors of Latin American cuisine, aromas of Cuban coffee and tourists and locals alike enjoying miles of pristine white-sand beaches. A short distance to the south, lies the Biscayne Bay, which is home to several listed species under the most important wildlife conservation policy on the books, the Endangered Species Act, including manatees, crocodiles, several sea turtle species, small-tooth sawfish and staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis). Just a couple miles down the road on U.S. Route 1, the heart of the coral reefs of South Florida, or the Florida Reef Tract can be found where it stretches 300 miles south to the Dry Tortugas National Park, making it the third largest barrier in the world. To the west of Miami, we find Everglades National Park, which is a designated World Heritage site with one of the most unique wetland ecosystems in the world. Everglades National Park is also one of the wettest regions in the United States, with many of its waterways finding their final destination in the Biscayne Bay, and ultimately into the Florida Reef Tract ecosystem, showing the interconnectedness of all of these South Florida ecosystems. These tropical coastal seascape ecosystems are characterized by seven connected ecosystems that include coastal strand, mangroves, seagrass beds, coral reefs, hard-bottom habitat, silt-bottom habitat and rocky-bottom habitat. Right in the middle of this mosaic of ecosystems lies the Port of Miami, nicknamed the “Gateway to the Americas” and “Cruise Capital of the World.” In this chapter we explore how major infrastructure projects may degrade delicate and imperiled coastal ecosystems despite strict federal, state and local laws, and how people and interest groups are working to protect these ecosystems.

The Dredging History of the Port of Miami

To meet the demands of the burgeoning market, the Port of Miami has undergone many dredging projects to accommodate larger shipping vessels and cruise ships throughout its history. Beginning in 1990, Congress authorized the deepening of the Port to 42 feet, which was completed in 1993. Since then, every 10 to 15 years, another port expansion dredging project has been implemented.

In Twilight Sleep, the protagonist Nona Manford considers the extent to which “people” interact with, and are transformed by, the cultural “landscapes” they visit or occupy. One of the goals of this book has been to demonstrate that while the pastoral seems to portray troubling fractures between the social self and native soil, Wharton is more struck by how these ostensibly divergent cultural categories superimpose and interpenetrate to form an ecocritical palimpsest. This is a finding that resonates with Greg Garrard's recent claim that the methods, motifs and practices of American “pastoral can be radical.” Like Terry Gifford and Lawrence Buell before him, Garrard recognizes that for ecocriticism, pastoral tropes—yearning for a socially stable rustic elsewhere with its pristine lakes and isolated farmsteads, the poetic motifs of “retreat-and-return,” plus the ethical unease triggered by unregulated industries—are not simply elements of fanciful literary texts but decisively shape the way contemporary readers grasp and interpret their material surroundings. This notion is elaborated by contributions to the essay collection Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (2011), which develops Buell's attitude to pastoral by promoting a robust re-orientation of the mode triggered by current environmental anxieties. For Garrard, this makes it all the more crucial to interpret pastoral—and so-called “nature writing” more broadly—not as “a finished model or ideology” but as a literary mode that largely eschews nostalgic posturing in favor of alerting us to the presence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, cultural codes and values. The imagery of apparently carefree and simple rural populations throws into relief the urbane, highly cultured poetic entity that crafts such imagery. Pastoral is therefore, in Garrard's view, an insistent “questioning” regarding the formation of an ethical individual and a good society, “be/longing” and the “root of human being on this earth.” It is this type of “questioning” that lends the extract above from Wharton's Twilight Sleep a peculiar intensity. Indeed, one of the central aims of this book has been to treat pastoral as a kind of palimpsest—a “parchment” upon which successive generations of artist-pilgrims have etched their impressions, constantly revising its imagery, formal procedures and lyrical effects.

These threats described in Chapter 2 have led to the tragic loss of nearly 50 percent of reef-building corals worldwide in the past 30 years, and their status continues to decline (Bruno & Selig, 2007; Côté et al., 2005; De’ath et al., 2012, Eddy et al., 2021; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2019). We are currently in a coral reef crisis with one-third of our reefs threatened with extinction (IUCN, 2021). According to the latest Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network report (2021), from 1978 to 1997, the world's stony coral populations remained relatively stable, accounting for approximately 32 percent of reef cover, meaning that when you look at the seafloor when swimming along a reef, you see about one-third of the bottom covered in hard coral species. However, in 1998, a mass coral bleaching event resulted in the loss of 8 percent of that cover, though the reefs were able to rebound back to ∼33 percent by 2009. Since 2009 however, there has been a steady decline in stony coral cover globally and a shift from coral-dominated reefs to algal-dominated ones, with various species of algae supplanting the space on the seafloor where the stony corals used to be (Scouter et al., 2021a). Algae and coral fight for the same habitat as both need similar conditions, especially exposure to sunlight (Swierts & Vermeij, 2016). From 2009 to 2018, we lost 13.5 percent (4,579 square miles) of stony coral cover worldwide—the equivalent of losing all stony corals on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (Scouter et al., 2021a). In contrast, algae cover on reefs, an indicator of stressed coral reefs, has increased by 20 percent in 2019 when compared to 2010, and the coral-to-algae ratio continues to increase in favor of algae. This is dire for the people who live next to reefs and depend on them for livelihoods. When people board an airplane and fly across the world to go diving, they do so for the coral species that are rapidly disappearing.

Caribbean Region

Coral cover and loss have varied across Earth's regions and time periods. The earliest observations of significant coral loss were documented in the Caribbean (Côté et al., 2005; Cramer et al., 2021). The Caribbean region represents ∼7 percent of the world's reefs (Jackson et al., 2014). Some of the largest barrier reefs in the world are found in the Caribbean Sea.

The factual connections between Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Gus Van Sant are known. In 1982, Fassbinder adapted Genet's Querelle de Brest; in 1991, calling on Udo Kier to act in My Own Private Idaho, Van Sant recreated within his cinema some of the most fascinating scenes from Fassbinder's work, not only moments of homosexual pick-ups and prostitution, but also dance and music hall numbers that, each time, transform the body into a pure enigma in terms of its immersion in light and appearances.

One of several problems that seems to determine these encounters and filiations is the emergence and use of the classical body in the context of modern filmmaking. For these rebellious and polemical filmmaking styles, what is meant by the sudden recourse to a masculine figure that immediately calls to mind Phidias, Praxiteles and Michelangelo? Is this simply a matter of erotic iconography? Making room for the figure of a lost body, of vanished ideal beauty? Or playing with neo-classical conventions, like Roland Barthes agreeing to place Girodet's Endymion on the cover of a new edition of S/Z?

All this and much more: Instances of Attic bodies in the films of Genet, Fassbinder and Van Sant are, on a profound level, figures of the body opening itself up to the image. On the one hand of course, because the ideal body is an image in se or, as Winckelmann summarizes the tradition, a kind of beauty produced by “brain-born images.” On the other hand, especially, because in all three cases, the presence of a beautiful anatomy provides the occasion for a reversal and its radicalization. Erwin Panofsky has shown how, in the history of styles, a theory of physical proportions reveals the organization of the relationship between the anatomy, space and the intellectual world.

General History of African Americans

African Americans are the citizens or residents of the United States who have origins in any of the black populations of Africa. However, the term refers to a racial group, most often to the people whose ancestors have experienced slavery in the United States. The genesis of African Americans was the result of forced detention and transport of Africans from their homeland across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1400s, European traders plundered the west coast of Africa for slaves. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British became active players in the theft and the sale of African human beings for profit. Africans were brought to the United States against their will to work on the plantations owned by the white in the South. The permanent settlement of Africans and the regular slave trade between Africa and the English North American colonies began in 1619. Therefore, the history of black slavery emerged in 1619, when a Dutch man brought twenty Africans in America, and sold them at Jamestown in Virginia.

The first shipload of colonists to Charleston in 1670 brought three enslaved Africans with them and the next year, Sir John Yeamans, an English colonial administrator and planter who served as Governor of Carolina from 1672 to 1674, brought more Africans to South Carolina. Over one lakh Africans were being brought in America each year. Merchant shippers from New York and New England imported Africans as usual commodities for the planters of Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina. Both laws and customs defined all Africans in the colonies as slaves by 1670. The enslaved Africans were gradually employed on the growing rice plantations in South Carolina from the 1690s, because numerous slaves were required to cultivate the plantations. From 1619 to 1700, the African in colonial North America increased from sixty to almost twenty-eight thousand.

During more than three centuries of the slavery era, an estimated fifteen million Africans were captured and shipped to the New World where they were sold into slavery. The majority of slaves went to the plantations in the Caribbean and South America. During 1700–1750, thousands of enslaved Africans were shipped to the American colonies each year. By 1776, the colonies had a slave population of more than five lacks. The majority of these enslaved Africans lived in the south of Maryland.