Collaborative Food Production as a Tool for Sustainable Behaviour

Abstract

To make people be able to effectively be able to make decisions to save the ocean from overexploitation, researchers are calling for strategies to make individuals more ocean literate. An Ocean Literacy Framework has been developed to increase public knowledge about the ocean and the relationship between humans and the ocean, but the framework does not yet address how the newly gained knowledge can be transformed into sustainable behaviours that benefit the state of the ocean. This study investigates blue community gardens as one possible solution to this problem. Members of blue community gardens pick up sustainable behaviours and gain ocean-related knowledge through farming their own seafood. While several factors can be seen to influence members’ behaviours, two stand out especially. The first is identity - members build strong social connections to each other and to the activities at the garden because they spend a lot of time together. Another important factor are people’s existing habits, even those that are not related to sustainability. Many members are part of their garden not primarily because they want to act sustainably but because they like to be active in their community, but they still pick up sustainable behaviours. The activities at blue community gardens can be categorized as serious leisure, therefore the results of this study indicate that future incentives to increase ocean literacy should consider approaching the topic from a “serious leisure” angle, not from an “interest in sustainability” one.