Cultural heritage, particularly intangible cultural heritage remains under utilised as a means of surfacing indigenous communities’ role as custodians of the ocean, and their traditional roles in resource exploitation and management. Importantly, traditional conceptions of the meaning and significance of individual species, including those under direct threat, these conceptions encompass both the cultural and spiritual and play a profound role in how communities understand their world and their role in it. These key cultural aspects of human relationships with then environment need to be considered alongside economic significance and the importance of biodiversity to the health of any particular eco-system. Additionally, it is important to recognise that the diversity of the entirely cultural inhabitants of the ocean - spiritual beings, ancestors, supernatural creatures – is also being eroded through multiple social and cultural threats. Dissociating these beings from other natural ocean inhabitants creates a division that is not reflected in, and misunderstands, indigenous conceptions of the ocean. The UK Global Challenges Research funded One Ocean Hub project, has adopted novel approaches to supporting these ongoing processes as well as exploring new ways of integrating them into broader debates around ocean governance. This talk will discuss work from local communities in Africa and the Pacific, including Ghana, South Africa, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Parallels between conceptions of the ocean will be explored, particularly its profoundly inhabited nature and the ways in which it is traditionally protected, and how this can conflict with modern economic exploitation, including tourist and heritage economies. The ways in which community concerns over a range of issues are surfaced in unexpected ways through contemporary arts forms such as murals, music video and wearable art will be discussed, as well as how these concerns can influence decision making processes that impact both cultural security and legal frameworks including the Global Biodiversity Framework in the face of over-fishing, climate change, marine pollution and deep-sea mining.

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