Australia’s Strategy for Nature 2024–2030 articulates three interconnected goals: connecting Australians with nature, caring for nature in its diversity, and building shared knowledge systems. While these goals are often approached through ecological science and policy design, their implementation in marine contexts depends equally on cultural meaning, ethical orientation, and the stories through which human–ocean relations are understood. This is the domain of the Blue Humanities.
This presentation explores how Blue Humanities scholarship can contribute to operationalising the Strategy for Nature across marine governance contexts, including fisheries management, marine conservation, and climate adaptation. These are sites where environmental decision-making is shaped not only by scientific evidence, but by competing values, histories, and ontologies of ocean belonging. In these spaces, governance effectiveness depends on legitimacy, relational trust, and the capacity to hold multiple ways of knowing.
Drawing on ecofeminist thought, Indigenous relational ontologies, and blue values, the paper proposes an ethics of relational care as a guiding orientation for implementation.
A central argument is that First Nations leadership must be understood not as consultation within pre-existing governance structures, but as agenda-setting authority that actively shapes the terms of knowledge production and decision-making. In this way, blue values approaches can help reframe the Strategy for Nature as not only a policy instrument, but a cultural and ethical transformation of human–ocean relations.
The presentation offers a conceptual pathway for integrating Blue Humanities perspectives into the operationalisation of national marine policy, with implications for governance design, legitimacy, and long-term ecological stewardship.