“The marine environment is clearly disregarded and undervalued in the framework.”

- Delegate from Finland, May 2021

“The marine environment is still undervalued, particularly the open ocean and the deep sea.”

- Delegate from Portugal, May 2021

“Though science agrees that 30% protection of terrestrial and marine areas is needed, some studies converge on the idea that 50% protection by 2050 would protect marine and terrestrial biodiversity while preserving ecosystem services.”

- Delegate from France, May 2021.

The above statements were delivered during opening plenary at the 24th meeting (Part 1) of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical, and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-24) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). They exemplify the sentiments expressed by many delegates that: i) failure to specify ‘marine’ biodiversity in early drafts of the CBD’s Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was unacceptable; ii) the CBD should address marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ); iii) further expansion of marine protected areas (MPAs) is a priority. As researchers studying marine issues in the CBD and other international organizations since 2008, we found the procession of delegates calling for more attention to marine ecosystems both noteworthy and unsurprising. In this paper, we situate calls for ‘more marine’ within the broader field of global biodiversity conservation and we analyze how ‘the field’ of global marine biodiversity conservation has been configured over time.

The article emerges from our work as part of a larger research collaboration studying the role of international conferences – like SBSTTA-24 – in global environmental governance (GEG). GEG “includes the institutions, processes, initiatives, actors, and organizations that shape environmental actions and outcomes in the global realm” (O'Neill et al., 2013, 443). It is characterized by “uncertainty and complexity, multi-scalar linkages across ecologies and policies, horizontal linkages across issue areas, and rapidly evolving problems and institutional initiatives” (Campbell et al., 2014a, 3). These characteristics make GEG difficult to study, but international conferences are one place where research on GEG is possible (Brosius and Campbell, 2010; MacDonald, 2010; Campbell et al., 2014a) and we have adopted ethnographic research methods to support it (Corson et al., 2014; Gray et al., 2020). Using what we call Collaborative Event Ethnography (CEE), we have built an understanding of GEG across successive international conferences spanning fifteen years (see Corson et al., 2019).

In this paper, we assume the role of international conferences in GEG and turn our attention to specifying how work done at conferences by a variety of actors has helped to configure the field of global marine biodiversity conservation. We describe the field – defined as “a recognized area of institutional life” (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983, 148) – and illustrate how it is shaped by, rather than simply revealed at, international conferences. In describing and analyzing ‘the field’ of global marine biodiversity conservation, we do not “claim to explain everything in the world at once” (Tsing, 2005, ix-x). Ethnographic study of global processes, with their “infinite interconnections and overlapping contexts” (Amit, 2000, 6), is always necessarily partial. Thus, the field we describe reflects our choices about which international meetings to attend and what questions to pursue, and our experiences (Corson et al., 2019). However, that the field we describe is partial and reflects methodological choices does not mean it is not ‘real.’ The field has wide ranging consequences for how marine biodiversity is known, represented, and conserved, and who benefits from and bears the costs of marine conservation.

Drawing on our past work (Gray, 2010; Campbell et al., 2013; Gruby and Campbell, 2013; Campbell et al., 2014b; Gray et al., 2014; Silver et al., 2015; Campbell et al., 2016; Gruby et al., 2016; Gray, 2018; Campbell and Gray, 2019; Campbell et al., 2022), we begin with a summary description of the field of global marine biodiversity conservation. We elaborate and substantiate this description through the analysis that follows, but we foreground it here so that we can focus our attention in this paper on how the field has been configured through specific practices.

What then is the field of global marine biodiversity conservation? We identify six key and overlapping characteristics. First, the field of global marine biodiversity conservation frames conservation threats, trends, patterns, needs, priorities, ambition, and action at the global scale.¹ Although action by nation states is crucial for marine conservation, it is insufficient, as two thirds of oceans lie in ABNJ. Second, scientists, often working in collaborations, provide key, authoritative inputs to the field. Scientists describe marine biodiversity, its significance, and trends in and patterns of loss. Scientists have described and mapped oceans in terms of global hotspots, ecoregions, trans-oceanic migratory corridors, and ecologically and biologically significant areas. Many scientists advocate for the protection of such areas. Third, large environmental non-government organizations (ENGOs) (and the less visible donors that support them) are active in field configuration. Individually and in collaboration, they advocate for and support implementation of marine protected areas (MPAs) and promote global MPA targets to motivate MPA expansion. Fourth, MPAs and related targets center the field of global marine biodiversity conservation and dramatic expansion of MPAs (in number, average size, and area coverage) over the last two decades is both a product of the field and productive of it. Fifth, while ENGOs and scientists are highly visible in the global field, other non-state actors and their knowledge of marine biodiversity are often obscured, including people living with MPAs in particular ‘local’ places. Increasingly, however, the interests of local people can and do enter the global field; the field is influenced by broader societal attention to concerns for equity, well-being, and participation, particularly by Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs). Individuals and representatives from IPLCs, ENGOs, Small Island Developing States (aka ‘Large Ocean States’), and civil society organizations speak in support of IPLCs connected to or dependent on marine resources and impacted by MPAs. However, their concerns are often accounted for in ways that ultimately maintain the field, rather than reframe it. Finally, the field is animated by competing emotions, with evocations of crisis (e.g. threats to marine biodiversity, governance gaps, data gaps), scientific progress (e.g. supported by new data technologies), wonder (e.g. remarkable creatures newly discovered), cultural vibrancy (e.g. in Pacific islands), and success (e.g. MPA expansion and field visibility).

To support our analysis of how this field has been configured, we review theory from institutional sociology and management studies on fields and field configuration and we identify ways the analytical potential of this literature can be enhanced. We then provide a brief overview of our methods, before identifying what we label field configuration practices. For each practice, we provide evidence of how it was used and to what effect within individual and across multiple international conferences. Our goals are to: 1) further substantiate our description of the field of global marine biodiversity conservation; 2) enhance our understanding of the role of international conferences in GEG generally, and for marine biodiversity conservation specifically; 3) demonstrate the relevance of field and field configuration theory to doing so; 4) contribute to theory on institutional fields. In relation to this final goal, we argue that analyses of field configuration should be attentive to specific field configuring practices and phases, as well as interactions among them.

The field of global marine biodiversity conservation is not static, ‘fixed’, homogeneous, or uncontested; fields are defined equally by what they include and exclude. Work is required to build, frame, and bound fields and it is this work, and specifically as evident at international conferences over time, that we analyze here. Among the diverse interests of the larger research collaboration, marine conservation is particularly well suited to this analysis. From our first CEE at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) 2008 World Conservation Congress (WCC), marine issues were emerging as a ‘new’ or ‘newly attended to’ field within global biodiversity conservation (Universalia Management Group, 2009; Brosius and Campbell, 2010; Gray, 2010; IUCN, 2018).² Thus, our research began as the field was being built, which allows us to elaborate field evolution and the role of different field configuring events and practices over time.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1990 [1980]) used the term ‘field’ to describe “relational arenas in which actors converge around particular interests and organizing principles while pursuing desired outcomes” (Wilshusen and MacDonald, 2017, 1830). In doing so, actors “take one another into account as they carry out interrelated activities” (McAdam and Scott, 2005, 10). Fields can evolve around issues – like global marine biodiversity conservation – and have both structure and frames. Structures position actors in relation to one another, while frames orient their work, and include meaning systems and shared understandings of issues that prioritize practices and give them legitimacy (Bartley, 2007). Fields have to be configured – momentum built, structures organized, frames maintained – a process of “enrolling actors in a collaborative project” (Bartley, 2007, 233). Field configuration can be conflictual, as actors with different interests, ideologies, and organizational forms “negotiate over issue interpretation” (Hoffman, 1999). In this view, fields are social rather than place based and configured in any number of locations.

Globalization poses challenges for understanding field configuration, as increasing global connections change both the nature of the social relations that constitute a given field and the links among field members. Further, fields exist that are necessarily ‘global,’ e.g. fields concerned with global climate change. If field building requires bringing actors “into routine contact with one another, under a common frame of reference, in pursuit of an at least partially shared project” (Bartley, 2007, 233), but the field of interest spans the “world’s social and economic landscapes” (Lampel and Meyer, 2008, 1025), how then is a field built and maintained?

Field configuring events (FCEs) are one answer to these questions (Lampel and Meyer, 2008, 1025). FCEs are moments when and places where field members come together, e.g. at trade-shows or conferences, and serve as “a vehicle through which certain actors negotiate a new organizational order” (MacDonald, 2010, 256). At these events “field members meet, converse, negotiate, explore joint actions, and develop projects” (Lampel and Meyer, 2008, 1028). In doing so, they (re)configure their field, i.e. assert (or challenge) their positions in relation to one another, shore up (or challenge) their shared understandings, and reinforce (or challenge) rules of behavior. FCEs are both the products and drivers of field evolution.

All FCEs are not the same. Some FCEs have strong ‘field mandates’ and “formal authority in specific domains” (Lampel and Meyer, 2008, 1028). FCEs can also evolve over time. As a field emerges, FCEs may focus on establishing norms, e.g. agreeing on terminology and vocabulary, practices and standards, or roles in relation to other fields. As a field matures, FCEs may focus on replication, e.g. expanding, refining, reinforcing, or solidifying beliefs, norms, and logic, and measuring performance (Lampel and Meyer, 2008, 1029). Within the same field (e.g. global climate change) and at its marquee FCE (the Conference of the Parties of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)), Schüssler et al. (2014) distinguish among FCEs over time as ‘regular’ or ‘high stakes’ and their different potentials for field configuration. Additionally, there can be variation within a single FCE, with multiple fields present simultaneously in distinct spaces with different structures and related rules. Some field members may be empowered, e.g. through differentiated access to specific spaces (Hardy and Maguire, 2010).

For GEG, convenings of multilateral organizations such as the agencies or agreements of the United Nations (UN) can serve as FCEs. In their study of the United Nations conference that resulted in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, Hardy and Maguire (2010) pose FCEs as discursive spaces where competing understandings of the problem of pollutants can be tracked in texts (written, spoken, and other). They trace changing narratives of Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) across FCEs to understand how DDT became an exception within the convention. In a second example, Schüssler et al. (2014) argue that the UNFCCC COP has become less effective as an FCE over time, due to growth of field membership, diversification of interests, and separate ‘social spaces’ that limit debate; “instead of field-endogenous catalysts of change, they [COPs] become mechanisms of field maintenance” (Schüssler et al., 2014, 2014). In contrast, Hughes (2015) focuses on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its role as a central object of struggle within the field of global climate governance.

Our CEE collaborators Ken MacDonald and Peter Wilshusen have also approached international conferences as FCEs (MacDonald, 2010; Wilshusen and MacDonald, 2017; Wilshusen, 2019). MacDonald (2010) uses the FCE concept to analyze the influence of the private sector in conservation and how it is normalized through events like the IUCN’s 2008 WCC. MacDonald includes texts in his analysis, but also attends to the dramaturgical and performative aspects of governance (Hajer, 2006), identifying how WCC structure, orchestration, and spectacle work to reinforce ‘private sector engagement’ as an IUCN norm. Wilshusen and MacDonald (2017) pursue this theme in examining the Corporate Sustainability Forum held as part of 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), where they document, the ‘logics, social technologies, and organizational forms’ used to further an economistic field of conservation governance (see also Wilshusen, 2019). Attention to performance and dramaturgy highlights how ‘the act’ of the meeting can privilege certain positions and actors working to (re)configure the field of biodiversity conservation.

The general literature on FCEs and the specific studies of FCEs related to global environmental issues have helped us think about the field of global marine biodiversity conservation and how it has been configured. However, we find the analytic potential of the literature on FCEs limited in four ways. We identify these limitations here, respond to them through our analysis, and return to them in our discussion and conclusions.

First, within the FCE literature key terms are often loosely and varyingly defined. For example, although there is agreement that there are different phases of field configuration, terms to describe these vary (e.g. emergence and maturity, building and framing). Whether or not phases are used descriptively (e.g. as a time line) or analytically (e.g. to better understand the field) differs from study to study. In this article, we identify and define three phases of field configuration – field building, field framing, and field bounding – and specify what is accomplished in each (see Section 4). We deliberately use terms that emphasize action; field configuration takes work.

Second, the identification of ‘stages’ or ‘phases’ can be read as linear, implying a field can ultimately be ‘configured.’ We label field building, framing, and bounding as phases, but treat them as interacting, overlapping, and ongoing, rather than sequential steps with an end point. Work at any one FCE is embedded in and related to work done at others. An established field, for example, may seek to engage new actors, and additional work to build the field may be required.

Third, the ‘how’ of field configuration is often vaguely specified. If field configuration requires developing rules, shared norms, and understandings of issues, how is this accomplished? If rules, norms and understandings are contested, how are contests resolved? How are field frames “forged, maintained, and eroded”? (Lounsbury et al., 2003, 77). Hardy and Maguire (2010) with their focus on narratives and their production, distribution, and circulation in texts, and MacDonald (2010) with his analysis of structure, orchestration, and spectacle, provide examples of specificity we find useful. We specify seven practices of field configuration and organize our analysis around them: orchestration; narrative; performance; alliance; social, objects, devices and technologies; formal outcomes, and; formal procedures. We focus our analysis on elaborating these practices and we argue that analyses of fields and FCEs more broadly would benefit from attention to such practices.

Finally, the literature on FCEs is under-attentive to agency. Most studies center human agency and assume or imply that (at least some) humans (individually or representing their organizations) act deliberately and strategically to achieve particular goals. Although the literature positions FCEs as having field-configuring potential, the focus on human agency can reduce FCEs to vehicles designed intentionally to support goal achievement (with their field configuring outcomes determined by how well designed they are, e.g. MacDonald, 2010; Schüssler et al., 2014), or a back drop against which social relations occur and strategies are deployed (e.g. Hardy and Maguire, 2010). In contrast, we argue that: i) non-human actors do work within FCEs, sometimes mobilized with intention by human actors, but often exceeding that intention; ii) human actors with general or even vague goals rather than specific strategies can influence field configuration; iii) FCEs have effects that are unplanned and these can overflow the events themselves. Field outcomes are neither pre-determined nor deterministic and alternative field configurations are always possible. This understanding of the field of global marine biodiversity conservation as both contingent and emerging from work of human and non-human actors allows us to think about the on-going work to configure—to build, frame, and bound—the field across multiple FCEs over time. Our understanding of field configuration is informed by and resonates with assemblage thinking, which we have mobilized in other analyses (Corson et al., 2019).

We draw on this understanding of the phases and practices of field configuration, and of agency and contingency, to describe how the field of marine biodiversity conservation has been configured through seven FCEs occurring from 2008-2022. We specify the phases and key practices of field configuration visible across events, in both informal and formal spaces within FCEs. We note here that theories of environmental governance and of field configuration draw attention to diverse state and non-state actors, with different opportunities and capacities to influence governance and field configuration. These opportunities and capacities vary across FCEs, phases of field configuration, and in relation to specific field configuration practices. In our larger collaboration, we have analyzed how Indigenous Peoples (Witter et al., 2015), scientists (Gray et al., 2014; Gray, 2018), Pacific islands states (Gruby and Campbell, 2013), civil society organizations (Corson et al., 2015) and the private sector (Wilshusen and MacDonald, 2017) participate in international meetings and with what effects. In this paper, we describe how specific actors employ practices in moments of field configuration, but we do not theorize the role of any single actor or groups of actors (e.g. Global North versus Global South, or from ENGO versus civil society). While we recognize the uneven power relations among actors that characterize both involvement in and influence on field configuration, we focus in this paper on practices. Field configuration involves bringing diverse actors together and aligning them in a shared project, a process that ‘blurs’ distinctions among them; it is their collective work that combines to configure the field of global marine biodiversity conservation.

This article draws on results of research conducted using collaborative event ethnography. CEE modifies traditional ethnographic methods to suit the time condensed intensity of mega-events like international conferences and the challenges of studying them as a lone researcher. CEE supports team-based ethnographic study, as detailed elsewhere (Brosius and Campbell, 2010; Campbell et al., 2014a; Corson et al., 2014; Corson et al., 2019; Gray et al., 2020). We provide a brief overview here.

At each CEE, we work together to collect and generate data in three ways. First, prior to a conference, we collect documents relevant to the agenda and related to our research interests, including official meeting documents, position papers, news and social media coverage, and press releases. Second, on site at the conference, we collaborate as a team to cover relevant events, including formal negotiations, scheduled ‘side events’, social events, press briefings, demonstrations, and informal gatherings in hallways and at lunch tables. Using theoretically informed participant observation guides, we take extensive ethnographic notes on what is said and who is saying it, but we also describe how events are structured and organized, what rules guide the conversation, the use of visual or other supports, the size and composition of audience, and the mood in the room or tenor of argument, among other things. We track how key phrases, visualizations, scientific studies, and other non-human actors move through events and with what effect. Third, we conduct interviews with relevant meeting participants. The resulting notes, photos, and transcripts are the data we analyze to identify field configuring practices described in this paper. Data analysis is iterative, beginning with daily debriefing sessions while at the conference; developing a shared understanding of our observations is key to the methodology.

Since 2008, we have studied seven FCEs that have helped to configure the field of global marine biodiversity conservation (Table 1).³ Institutionally, we have focused on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the United Nations (UN), specifically its Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and its Commission on Sustainable Development. As the decision-making body for a binding international agreement, CBD Conference of the Parties (COP) has a strong field mandate and the two CBD COPs we studied were high stakes, as they included negotiations over long-term strategic plans (the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework).

Our methods differ from those used in most other studies of FCEs in three ways. First, ethnography is at the core, adapted with intention to the study of FCEs (Campbell et al., 2014a). In other studies, ethnographic style observations often provide context for analysis of other data (e.g., Hardy and Maguire, 2010; Schüssler et al., 2014). Second, our study extends to FCEs hosted by multiple organizations over 15 years. Although Hardy and Maguire (2010) and Schüssler et al. (2014) examined multiple FCEs, these were hosted by the same organization over a shorter time frame. Third, global biodiversity conservation is a broad topic, and global marine biodiversity conservation is one of the many fields that co-exists, overlaps, and competes for attention within the broader field. In contrast, regulating persistent organic pollutants (Hardy and Maguire, 2010) is a more narrowly scoped goal. Our methods inform our understanding of fields and FCEs, for example, regarding the role of FCEs hosted by different organizations in configuring the field of global marine biodiversity conservation; on different phases of field building across FCEs; and on how a (sub)field emerges from within a broader field. We develop these insights in the discussion.

We organize our analysis around seven fields configuration practices (Table 2). Rather than enumerate every instance of each practice, we describe how each was deployed across events, for one of the three phases of field configuration (field building, framing, and bounding). This does not imply a particular practice is only relevant at the selected phase; we include some cross-phase referencing to illustrate this. Further, practices are often combined – e.g. ‘narratives’ are often ‘performed’ – but we have isolated practices to enhance conceptual clarity. Table 2 summarizes the practices, their definitions, general examples, and specific evidence of their use as detailed in our published work to date. We cite these existing publications as evidence where relevant and supplement them with new data throughout the analysis.

We began this paper with a description of the field of global marine biodiversity conservation and have illustrated the work to configure it over time, across seven FCEs hosted by three different organizations. At FCEs, diverse actors mobilized formal and informal field configuration practices to build momentum for the field, to frame it, and to bound it and that work is ongoing. In this discussion, we reflect on what our work contributes to an understanding of field configuration and FCEs, and the role of FCEs in global environmental governance.

First, in examining multiple FCEs over time, our work aligns with and extends existing studies of environmental field configuration. We traced field configuration across events hosted by different organizations concerned with biodiversity conservation generally (IUCN and CBD) and sustainable development broadly (UN Commission on Sustainable Development). At FCEs hosted by these organizations, marine biodiversity conservation is one among many topics addressed. Our analysis provides new insights into field building, as enthusiasm for the field of global marine biodiversity conservation had to be built at FCEs where multiple issues compete for attention. Some of the informal field configuration practices, like efforts by the IUCN marine team to spotlight oceans at WPC 2014 or of Pacific islands states to perform a region at CBD COP10 (Gruby and Campbell, 2013), illustrate efforts to gain and sustain attention within this broader context. Both the success in field building and the on-going work to maintain it is illustrated by the quotes at the beginning of this paper, from CBD delegates complaining about lack of specification of marine issues in the zero draft of the GBF. In explaining the omission, the CBD Secretariat argued that it was no longer necessary to specify marine ecosystems, as it is now taken for granted that they are included in all CBD work. This argument was rejected by marine proponents; field building over time may have succeeded in ensuring that marine is a high priority within the broader field of global biodiversity conservation, but proponents were not willing to take this for granted and pressed successfully for continued marine visibility within the broader field of biodiversity conservation.

Second, looking at multiple organizations and FCEs challenges any straightforward assessment of ‘strong’ field mandates and their association with formal decision-making authority (Lampel and Meyer, 2008). As an international treaty with binding outcomes for member states, the CBD COP has a ‘stronger’ field mandate than do the IUCN’s WPC or WCC. However, our work shows that these FCEs are linked and that actors can circumvent and even take advantage of a ‘weak’ field mandate. For example, the WPC has the ‘weakest’ field mandate among the FCEs studied, but the outcome document from WPC 2014 was effectively mobilized beyond it. The weak field mandate of the WPC may, in fact, explain how and why MPA advocates were able to insert their preferred language in The Promise of Sydney; few attendees were participating in or paying attention to outcome document negotiations, because the WPC lacks decision-making authority. This preferred language –30% of oceans in strictly protected areas – was later invoked as precedent at the WCC during the IUCN Member’s Assembly, when resolutions and recommendations were debated and where debate was disciplined via rules of voting. The resolution then informed lobbying efforts directed at the CBD by both the High Ambition Coalition and the “30 by 30” campaign, which were partially successful. More generally, the lack of formal authority in the IUCN combined with its majority rather than consensus voting rules allow members to pass resolutions and recommendations that are ecologically, politically, economically, and socially diverse, and in doing so, to ‘push’ the CBD COP toward, in this case, an ambitious MPA target. Overall, our work illustrates the value of studying different organizations and FCEs over time and assessing their meaning for global environmental governance together. Power is not inherent to organizations with strong field mandates, but exercised via relations among organizations and field members.

Third, we expand and name field configuration practices, including: orchestration, narrative, performance, alliances, social objects, devices and technologies, formal outcomes, and formal procedures. Both our theoretical interests and ethnographic approach directed us to go beyond written and spoken texts to include performances like the arrival of the Vaka at WPC 2014, and social objects, devices and technologies, like maps of human impacts on oceans circulating at WCC 2008 and CBD COP10 (Gray, 2018). By specifying multiple practices of field configuration, we explicitly link theory of field configuration to the ‘work’ required to configure fields. We do not suggest the practices we identify are the only ones, but we argue that specifying practices (and attending to the same practices across FCEs over time) enhances our understanding of FCEs and their role in global environmental governance. These theoretical insights may have applied uses as well: actors involved in global field-building can engage these ‘practices’ as a conceptual framework and language to guide more explicit discussion, deliberation, and debate about their roles, strategies, and influence.

Fourth, we organized our analyses around individual field configuration practices, each in relation to a specific phase of field building, to provide some conceptual clarity. In reality, practices and phases are entangled and overlapping, and specific practices can contribute simultaneously to different phases; MPA targets play a role in building, framing, and bounding the field. However, our work does suggest that some practices might be more impactful, or even necessary, at particular phases of field configuration. Many informal practices helped to build momentum around broad interests in and concerns for marine biodiversity. Field framing, however, required narrowing those interests and concerns to focus, in this case, on MPAs. Due to the inevitable conflicts that arise when moving from broad interests to prioritizing among them in field framing, formal outcomes and formal procedures became important. For example, we found broad support for marine conservationists as reflected in and mobilized via narratives, performance, and alliances (Gruby and Campbell, 2013; Gray et al., 2014). However, and when translating broad support for marine issues into a field frame around MPAs, formal mechanisms like precedents or rules of voting became important for framing and bounding. Critically, some of the work to frame and bound the field – keeping alternatives (like fisheries) out of frame and defending the frame’s purity – is not visible in formal outcomes of FCEs. Our ethnographic approach allows us to see what and who is excluded and how; had we not been ‘in the room’ when fisheries were removed from the marine resolution at WCC 2008 or when rules of membership were invoked to restrict debate on the marine resolution at WCC 2016, we may not have known either had happened.

Fifth, our work suggests that field configuration is never complete, that work is always required to build, frame, and bound a field. The field of global marine biodiversity conservation is framed around MPAs now, but the field frame cannot be taken for granted. We see several potential pressure points. For example, fisheries, and specifically small-scale fisheries, will continue to press for attention within the field of global marine biodiversity conservation. The FAO guidelines for small scale fisheries (FAO, 2014), recent update of the Hidden Harvest Report on SSF (FAO et al., 2023), and the general emerging interests in Blue Economy and concerns about the place of SSF within it, have together generated renewed attention to the topic, particularly and critically among philanthropies that have historically supported marine conservation and MPA expansion. Whether or not the inclusion of OECMs in the MPA target can accommodate this interest remains to be seen. Plastic pollution is currently the subject of an UN Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee working to develop an international legally binding instrument, and marine plastics present a different type of challenge to an MPA frame, one not easily ‘contained’ by MPAs. On the other hand, the UNCLOS implementing agreement for conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (UN General Assembly, 2023), once entered into force, will provide new momentum and opportunity for MPA expansion in ABNJ. Indeed, without such an agreement, GBF Target 3 for 30% global MPA coverage is impossible to meet. That an UNCLOS implementing agreement was imminent when the GBF was finalized at CBD COP15 helps to explain why 30% MPA coverage was accepted with limited contestation, in contrast to prolonged debate about 10% at CBD COP10 (Campbell et al., 2014b). We have not included UNCLOS negotiations in this analysis, but the field of global marine biodiversity conservation is not ‘contained’ with the organizations and FCEs that we describe here.

We have found the literature on fields, field configuration and FCEs helpful for thinking through our research and analysis undertaken over the course of 15 years, at multiple international conferences. The literature provides theory and analytics that allowed us to identify and specify, from within hundreds of hours of observation, some of the moments and practices that illustrate how the field of global marine biodiversity has been configured. It helped us elaborate and further substantiate our understanding of that field. Conversely, applying field configuration theory and analytics in the context of our ethnographic research on a broad field and FCEs of multiple international organizations has generated new theoretical insights, into field configuration phases, the roles of formal and informal practices and of diverse actors including non-human ones, and relations among FCEs. Our elaboration of specific field configuration practices expands the analytics that can be deployed in FCE research and may even inform practice. Recognizing that fields are configured and that there are practices that can be deployed to reconfigure them invites field practitioners to reflect on ‘the field’ that exists, what it achieves and who benefits from it, and what other configurations might be possible. Given contemporary interest in and momentum for oceans governance – whether in specific initiatives like the development of a code for seabed mining by the International Seabed Authority, or general interests in an ocean-climate nexus or the potential of the blue economy – such reflection is both timely and critical to the future of our oceans.

The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because, although the data we produce and analyze in our research results from public events, Institutional Review Board protocols for research with human subjects, the contextualized nature of ethnographic field notes, and restrictions on recordings at some of the events we attend limit the extent to which our data can be meaningfully shared beyond our research team. A limited selection of data are available through Mount Holyoke University. Requests to access the datasets should be directed to https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/handle/10166/3758 or LC, lcampbe@duke.edu.

The studies involving humans were approved by Duke University Campus Institutional Review Board, Colorado State University Institutional Review Board, and University of Guelph Research Ethics Board. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required from the participants or the participants’ legal guardians/next of kin because the research is based on observation of meetings that are public events where participants have no expectations of privacy.

LC: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft. RG: Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing. NG: Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – review & editing.