Weaving the WAVE: Navigating trade-offs in co-producing a Nordic marine bioeconomy

Planetary health is acutely under threat and the ocean is part of what Gupta et al. (2024) call the “global commons” – the natural systems that support life on Earth – whose rapid deterioration is already undermining energy, food and water security and increasing risks of “disease, disaster, displacement, and conflict” (Gupta et al.. Responding to this global urgency requires concrete, regional interventions that rethink our relationship with marine resources. WAVE is a new Nordplus Horizontal project that brings together partners from Finland, Sweden, and Latvia to explore how marine and aquatic “waste” streams in cold-climate regions can be turned into valuable materials, skills and opportunities. The WAVE project combines regional sustainability challenge mapping, an international seminar, cross-border teaching development and a hackathon, with the aim of strengthening both higher education and the emerging bioeconomy. 

Making the "weaving" visible 

With this blog post we do something slightly unusual. Rather than reporting on a completed project, it is written at the very beginning of WAVE, while aims, roles and expectations are still being negotiated. We do not only introduce the project; we also discuss it through recent studies (e.g. Chambers et al, 2021) of collaborative “weaving” of research and practice. By placing WAVE in this landscape from the outset, we are making our assumptions, doubts and design choices visible from the beginning. In that sense, the blog is not just a communication channel but a transparency and management tool: a way to openly surface possible trade-offs and risks early on, and to make more deliberate and accountable choices about how we organise collaboration as the project unfolds. 

Although the proposal presents WAVE as a clear sequence of work packages and deliverables, research on co-production for sustainability reminds us that such initiatives are always shaped by underlying trade-offs. Chambers et al. (2021) systematically mapped collaborative diversity in 32 initiatives from 6 continents, focusing on how they co-produce diverse outcomes. Their study “Six modes of co-production for sustainability” shows that different “modes” of co-production – for example, focusing on researching solutions, navigating differences or empowering voices – tend to produce different types of outcomes and involve distinctive risks. WAVE is hybrid in this sense: it seeks to generate synthesised knowledge about marine bioresource challenges, to bring diverse actors together in seminars and hackathons, and to give students and regional stakeholders a more visible role in shaping the future of the marine bioeconomy. 

Navigating the five key trade-offs of co-production 

Several key tensions follow from this hybridity. One central trade-off lies between local specificity and transnational scalability. The study by Chambers and her colleagues points to the importance of exploring “multiple impact pathways, trade-offs among approaches and cross-scalar dynamics. (Chambers et al. 2021, p.984)”.  On the one hand, WAVEs’ mapping activities require deep attention to the situated realities of different coastal and aquatic contexts. On the other hand, the project is expected to produce insights and educational materials that travel across the Nordic and Baltic region. If too much emphasis is placed on producing a unified narrative of “the” Nordic marine waste challenge, important local differences may be glossed over. If the focus remains entirely on context-specific cases, the added value of cross-border collaboration may remain unrealised. Treating the Nordic/Baltic dimension as a comparative frame – explicitly exploring how similar issues play out differently across sites – offers one way of navigating this tension. 

A second trade-off concerns the relationship between student learning and industry usefulness. WAVE aims simultaneously to enhance students’ skills in circular bioeconomy and to produce ideas and prototypes of interest to companies and other organisations. High-quality learning typically requires room for experimentation and even failure, whereas corporate partners often prioritise streamlined processes and implementable solutions – echoing findings that “knowledge per se does not mobilise action” and that translating strategies into operational targets remains difficult in corporate settings (Bebbington et al., 2024). If student work is framed primarily as a source of deliverables for companies, there is a danger that both learning quality and the integrity of the co-production process suffer. If pedagogical priorities dominate without sufficient attention to partners’ needs, stakeholder engagement may wane. Addressing this tension involves being explicit that companies are contributing not only problems to be solved but also to the education of future professionals, and framing hackathon outcomes as explorations and option sets rather than ready-made fixes. 

A third tension emerges between the production of knowledge and the pursuit of deeper systemic change. For example, the Chambers study highlights the importance of “reframing” but they also issue a warning: even if a project is very good at changing narratives and concepts, this does not automatically produce new laws, management regimes, budgets or behaviours. WAVE is rich in planned outputs: reports, teaching modules, seminar documentation and “success stories”. These are important, but they will not automatically translate into new practices or institutions. The challenge is to design these products as levers for transformation rather than as endpoints. For example, the bioeconomy course module can function as an institutional anchor that embeds co-productive, practice-oriented approaches in curricula beyond the life of the project, while events such as the seminar and hackathon can be used to cultivate relationships and commitments that persist after their formal conclusion. 

The emphasis on cross-border collaboration raises a further trade-off between collaborative ambition and coordination capacity. Meaningful interaction across institutions and countries is resource-intensive and depends on sustained relational work. If coordination costs are underestimated, partners may either fall back into nationally bounded activities or overburden a small group of individuals. Drawing on what Chambers et al. describe as “relating together”, i.e. careful facilitation, social cohesion, trust and long-term engagement, WAVE could treat relational capacity as a critical precondition for translating co-produced knowledge into institutional and practical change (Chambers et al., 2021). Recognising coordination as a substantive form of labour, creating space to discuss tensions openly in steering group meetings, and embedding WAVE activities into existing courses and programmes can help maintain collaboration without overextending capacity. 

Finally, there is an inherent tension between experimental innovation and the need for continuity and care in social-ecological systems. The planned hackathon in Åland is designed to generate energy, creativity and new ideas around marine bioresources. Yet, coastal and marine environments require long-term stewardship. If the hackathon is treated as a one-off spectacle, there is a risk of a “pop-up utopia”, an “innovation theatre” with limited follow-through. Positioning it as a node in longer trajectories – feeding into thesis projects, internships or pilots, and linking teams with committed mentors – can help to connect short-term experimentation with longer-term change. 

From risk management to reflective practice 

WAVE, like any externally funded project, includes a formal risk register. But many of the most important risks are better understood as manifestations of these deeper trade-offs: disengagement, delays or coordination problems often signal unresolved tensions between competing goals rather than mere technical failures. Approaching project governance as a reflective practice – regularly asking which modes of co-production are being foregrounded, which outcomes are being prioritised in practice, and which tensions are becoming problematic – can help the consortium navigate more deliberately. In doing so, WAVE has the opportunity not only to produce useful knowledge and teaching materials, but also to contribute to the evolving art of co-producing a sustainable marine bioeconomy in the Nordic and Baltic region. 

Authors:

Tomas Träskman, Principal Lecturer Accountability and Sustainability

Paula Linderbäck, Principal Lecturer Circular Economy

Stewart Makkonen-Craig, Senior Lecturer in Material Sciences

Sources

Chambers, J. M., Wyborn, C., Ryan, M. E., Reid, R. S., Riechers, M., Serban, A., Bennett, N. J., Cvitanovic, C., Fernández-Giménez, M. E., Galvin, K. A., Goldstein, B. E., Klenk, N. L., Tengö, M., Brennan, R., Cockburn, J. J., Hill, R., Munera, C., Nel, J. L., Österblom, H., … Pickering, T. (2021). Six modes of co-production for sustainability. Nature Sustainability, 4(11), 983–996. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00755-x  

Bebbington, J., Blasiak, R., Larrinaga, C., Russell, S. L., Sobkowiak, M., Jouffray, J.-B., & Österblom, H. (2024). Shaping nature outcomes in corporate settings. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 379(1903), 20220325. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2022.0325   

Gupta, J., Bai, X., Liverman, D. M., Rockström, J., Qin, D., Stewart-Koster, B., Rocha, J. C., Jacobson, L., Abrams, J. F., Andersen, L. S., Armstrong McKay, D. I., Bala, G., Bunn, S. E., Ciobanu, D., DeClerck, F., Ebi, K. L., Gifford, L., Gordon, C., Hasan, S., … Gentile, G. (2024). A just world on a safe planet: A Lancet Planetary Health–Earth Commission report on Earth-system boundaries, translations, and transformations. The Lancet By Tomas Planetary Health, 8(10), e813–e873. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2542-5196(24)00042-1