Vision Setting

Engaging young people in ocean decision-making is a vital step toward fostering environmental stewardship and ensuring that future generations have a voice in the issues that affect them. But how do we move from broad ideas to actionable outcomes? In our recent workshop, we tackled this question head-on; combining lived experiences, collaborative brainstorming, and clear strategies for measuring success to create a meaningful research process. We also utilised Mural, a visual collaboration tool, to help us generate research questions and share our thoughts creatively.

The foundation of any impactful community or participatory research lies in the lived experiences of those involved. In our workshop, we began by reflecting on how our personal stories and connections to the ocean shape the way we view engagement in decision-making. This exercise helped us identify the real-world challenges and opportunities young people face when trying to participate in ocean-related decisions.

Exploring our lived experiences around Youth Engagement in Ocean Decision-Making

• Why Lived Experience Matters: By grounding our research in personal reflections, we ensured that the questions we generated were deeply rooted in our unique perspectives and experiences. Each participant shared the challenges they’ve observed or faced when trying to influence decisions. This helped us understand how different backgrounds, communities, and experiences might affect the way young people engage with ocean issues.

• Personal Stories Inform Research Questions: We quickly realised that understanding lived experience wasn’t just a side-note - it was central to our approach. By weaving these personal reflections into the research process, we could ensure that our research was authentic and responsive to real-world needs.

• Focus on Key Themes: As we brainstormed, we identified recurring themes around the barriers to youth involvement in ocean decision-making, the importance of accessible platforms for engagement, and the role of education and awareness. We also discussed how to empower young people to take action on ocean-related issues, both at the local and global levels.

Crafting a Vision for Youth Engagement in Ocean Decision-Making

With these lived experiences in mind, we turned our attention to creating a vision for the future. The goal of this vision-setting exercise was think about - How do we think youth should be engaged in ocean decision-making?

Using Mural as a collaborative tool again, we brainstormed and visually mapped out our vision for how youth engagement could look. We broke down the process into key themes, using Mural’s digital whiteboard and sticky notes to organise and refine our thoughts. This visual, interactive approach allowed everyone to contribute their ideas and see how different pieces of the puzzle fit together. Together, these phases of the workshop are helping us to see the "big picture" of the research problem, our personal reflections, positionalities and what we want to try to achieve. Our next challenge will be formulating these discussions into research questions that are both feasible and impactful - stay tuned!