Abstract
The ocean is a medium. It connects individuals, nation-states, landmasses, cities (coastal or not), communities, ethnic groups, world religions, non-governmental organisations and other entities, allowing them to exchange resources and ideas with each other. It connects humanity to nature, and to the natural resources which humanity can exploit (sometimes with permanent cost. For centuries, the countries of the Upper Guinea Coast, including Sierra Leone, have been enmeshed in relations of unequal exchange mediated by the Atlantic waters that connect them, as the triangular trade did, to Europe and North America. Today, Sierra Leone is rebuilding for the twenty-first century, and confronts a world in which the laws of ocean management have grown in scope and changed in focus since the time of the suppression of the slave trade and Sierra Leone’s later strategic position within the British empire’s network of sea power. Fisheries, environmental protection, and the protection of tangible and intangible heritage all come within the purview of ocean management today: this chapter reviews the political and epistemological challenges this means for policy in the context of Sierra Leonean’s reconstructed democracy.
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The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance provided by the University of Durham during the period when this chapter was written, especially the access it provided to online archive resources.
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O’Kane, D. (2022). Policy, Epistemology, and the Challenges of Inclusive Oceans Management in Sierra Leone. In: Boswell, R., O’Kane, D., Hills, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Blue Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99347-4_17
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