We take our empirical and theoretical starting point in the practices of ecopreneurship in the making of marine markets. Seaweed has gained renewed relevance in the wake of a growing interest in alternative production and consumption. This coincides with a widespread interest in the environment and the production of sustainable lifestyles. In this context, there are a number of women entrepreneurs who, for various reasons, have chosen to invest their time and work in seaweed. The making of seaweed as a valuable resource takes place, and makes sense, in specific settings. Seaweed is related to different kinds of values and narratives depending on context. To gain a deeper understanding of how these ecopreneurs cope with tensions between different values, we set out to analyse the performative dimensions of a number of ideological narratives. The production of seaweed as a sustainable resource involves sensemaking processes, shaped as scenes and storylines that carry a specific meaning. In the process of sensemaking different seaweed stories are produced and re-produced as narratives. What kind of stories and practices are activated in the making of a sustainable and creative lifestyle? How is seaweed performed and described as a significant resource in green entrepreneurial practices? 

The fulfillment of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is very much an issue about resources: How are resources articulated, created, and utilized? What is considered a resource, what exists in abundance, what is scarce, and when does something cease to be a resource? In our contribution, we address these issues with a focus on seaweed. By analyzing stories from environmental planners and ecopreneurs about seaweed, we demonstrate the phenomenon called resourcification — the social process that makes something a resource. From the stories, we illustrate the contexts of the resourcification and de-resourcification of seaweed. This allows us to show how resources, such as seaweed, are socially produced and become part of life. To conclude, we suggest that resourcification provides a provisional sustainability storyline suitable for working toward the SDGs in the Anthropocene.

This paper constructs an ethics of managing by reading Latour’s notion of Gaia with Arendt’s notion of storytelling. Gaia implies reframing the ethical foundation for making stories as well as it has ontological consequences for how we perceive stories. We suggest reframing storytelling into storymaking. This concept attunes to how storymaking is part of making life that becomes through, relies on, and is answerable to multiple other lives: human as well as nonhuman. Second, storymaking allows depicting managers’ imagination of themselves and what they do in the complex webs of relations that managers are part of. We put storymaking to work in discussing the processes of translation that occur when new managers transition from management education for sustainability to work life. Our re-storying of their stories attunes to their ethical compass and how they enact it into being. We attune to the tensions involved in building a stable foundation for their storymaking and the compromises they make in coping with fleeting and, at times, chaotic organizational realities. Attuning to how organizations make life and affect the conditions of caring for life is important for judging organizational action. Second, storymaking allows understanding of managing as a process that involves making stories about life spiritually and materially, thereby stabilizing life amid chaos. 

In the Anthropocene, it becomes problematic to imagine a sustain-able balance between society and the environment. This calls for post-sustainability modes of articulating human/non-human rela-tionships. As an attempt towards an Anthropocenic understanding of society and the environment, we analyse how ecosystem services are mobilised in marine spatial planning in the south of Sweden. The study investigates how ecosystem services are understood and narrated in environmental strategy and interviews with environ-mental planners. We focus on seaweed and sand. These are two kinds of materials and potential resources that materially circulate   Volume2635The making of a beachFilippa SäweJohan HultmanCecilia Fredrikssonacademicquarterresearch from the humanitiesakademisk kvarterAAUand force together society and the environment in planning dis-course and practice. Our findings show that although ecosystem services are readily understood as an anthropocentric construc-tion, when mobilised in planning to manage an unruly nature they can be re-storied as an ontological mediator in human/non-human relations.

In this chapter, we analyze a number of challenges concerning the possibilities of seaweed reaching a larger Swedish retail market. Consumers seem to be quite open and flexible regarding the positioning of seaweed products in stores. As previous research has shown, certain consumer groups feel like taking responsibility when it comes to consuming more sustainably. These consumer groups could function as early adopters for new seaweed products and be targeted accordingly. Retailers and practitioners could help consumers to understand these new products by educating them about sustainability and providing sustainability services. Vegetarian or vegan alternatives for already-established products could be placed next to these familiar foods in order to make it easy for the consumer to understand how the new product is intended to be used, and how it fits into current cooking and eating practices. The results reveal a disparity and ambivalence in consumers’ attitudes and approaches to seaweed, paving the way for new consumer insights, retail guiding, and in-store services. We emphasize the responsibility of the retail sector in being one of the main actors introducing alternative and new food products. We also raise issues relating to communication, organization, and to how to facilitate sustainable food.

The article addresses the broader relationships between seaweed and algae as a marine resource, destination development, and sustainability. In many European countries, an industry around seaweed has emerged, ranging from high-end restaurants that provide their customers with local, seasonal and sustainable ingredients, to entrepreneurs offering “harvest your own seaweed”-tours. In this explorative study, we focus on different ways of experiencing this marine resource in a Swedish context, to better understand its economic and social potential. Taking a consumer perspective, we investigate through an online questionnaire and reviews from an online consumer-to-consumer travel-planning portal how seaweed and algae are validated. By exploring people's notions, the aim is to understand the potential and value of this marine resource better. Where is seaweed encountered and enjoyed? How is it used? What is experienced to be valuable about this resource? We identify possibilities for utilizing algae and seaweed in order to foster future business opportunities for local communities, as well as to integrate the resource more in our society. We show how algae and seaweed are experienced in diverse settings and dimensions, such as at home, while being a tourist, as part of everyday life, as a special treat, within nature, and as food.

Marine spatial planning (MSP) can be understood as mapping and (re)bordering a three-dimensional landscape in time and space. We theorize MSP in Southern Sweden by the environmental ethics expressed in Torsten Hägerstrand’s time-geography. By doing this, we are able to pose questions about wise resource use and human-environment interaction.In Southern Swedish municipalities, MSP is typically coordinated by one ecologist and one planner. The ecologist is primarily concerned with conservation and can be said to act as ‘the voice of nature’. The planner focuses on use and is concerned with distribution of activities in time and space. When mapping the marine three-dimensional landscape, one of their tools is ecosystem services.We show how MSP is a process where economic issues associated with costs are transformed into values of environmental stewardship and sustainability ethics via the notion of benefits. Ecosystem services are used as a pedagogical tool to communicate with politicians in terms of municipal benefits, and with the public in terms of the values of caring for the environment.We conclude that the landscape of sustainability ethics resulting from MSP is dependent on (1) the combination of ecological and planning practices, and (2) the mediating function of ecosystem services. The result is that MSP can be understood as time-geography in practice where ecosystem services are used to dissolve the border between environment and society to create a new fluid landscape of environmental ethics.

Sustainability science research is characterized by its high transdisciplinary ambitions. However, despite claims to urgent social change, important sustainability principles—including social complexity issues such as learning and knowledge sharing among stakeholders—are not fully contextualized and understood within the general framework of sustainability science research. To explore possible synergies between sustainability science research and social analysis, this chapter uses a qualitative method to account for the theoretical and practical implementation of a transdisciplinary research process. Through one example of a change in Swedish natural resource management policy, the paper demonstrates how a top–down and bottom–up conflict in natural resource management was dealt with by the creation of an innovative environmental governance constellation. This was done by the mobilization of the theoretical concept of ‘boundary objects’ to develop and maintain coherence over time between stakeholders and social worlds sharing a common sustainability interest but with conflicting stakes. It is concluded that ‘boundary objects’—here, a new communication platform—can facilitate cooperation between stakeholders regarding the complexities of social–ecological systems governance and policy.