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'Monstrous': Indigenous rangers' struggle against the plastic ruining Arnhem Land beaches.

How Disaster Aid Ravaged an Island People.

There is growing awareness of the need for greater acknowledgement of underwater prehistoric cultural resources as part of management and regulation of the seabed around many maritime countries, especially those with large indigenous populations and history such as Australia. Prehistoric cultural places and landscapes inundated by Post-glacial sea-level rise on Australia's continental shelf remain largely out-of-sight and out-of-mind, hence awareness and hence legal protection of this resource is lacking. There is a clear need for greater integration of archaeology and cultural heritage management within the marine sciences as well as a greater awareness of this resource as part of a common heritage more generally. This paper explores some of the dichotomies between Western and Indigenous cultures in valuing and managing the seabed. We argue that in developing science-policy, an attempt at least needs to be made to bridge both the gap between the nature and culture perspectives, and the jurisdictional divide between land and sea. Part of the answer lies in a convergence of Indigenous knowledge with Western science approaches, focused around our understanding of physical processes impacting past and present coastal landscapes and on the seabed itself. We explore several case studies from northern and Western Australia that are trying to do this, and which are helping to provide a greater appreciation of the inundated landscapes of the inner shelf as part of a common heritage.

The Introduction of this paper argues that current coastal and ocean management approaches like marine spatial planning (MSP) often do not adequately acknowledge and integrate Indigenous and Local Knowledge (ILK). This is problematic because how humans value and perceive coastal and marine resources is integrally linked to how they use and manage these resources, especially in adapting to social-ecological change. Coastal and marine resources are situated within complex social-ecological systems that are culturally, economically, historically and politically embedded. Therefore, management approaches have to integrate transdisciplinary and contextual perspectives in order to be relevant, sustainable and adaptive. Following extensive research in Algoa Bay, South Africa this article highlights several pathways to bridge the gap between existing ILK and current coastal and ocean management approaches. The Methods section discusses how the authors worked in tandem with a bottom-up (engaging with Indigenous and local coastal and marine resource users) and top-down (engaging with coastal governance authorities and practitioners) approach. In order to answer the primary research question "How can ILK be integrated into area-based ocean management like MSP"? the authors employed arts-based participatory methods as well as in-depth interviews and workshops with coastal governance authorities and practitioners over several months. This work then culminated in a one-day multi-stakeholder workshop which brought both ILK holders and coastal authorities and practitioners together to collaboratively identify pathways to integrate this knowledge into coastal and ocean management. In the Results and Discussion section the authors present and discuss five co-identified pathways to integrate ILK in coastal and ocean management which include: adopting contextual approaches to coastal and ocean management; increasing transparency and two-way communication between coastal authorities and