Restorying the Ocean: Co-creating Futures for Law
How relationality, co-creation and connectivity are restorying law through ocean stories
Authors: Mana Tugend, Margherita Paola Poto, & Endalew Enyew; Illustrations: Sarah Mohamed & Sanpo Yokoi
What happens when the law learns to listen, not only to constitutions and institutions, but to tides, to coral reefs, ancestral fishing grounds, and the hands of children transforming discarded fishnets into dreams on a beach in Gaza?
As part of the Reimagining Constitutional Ecology (RICE) symposium at Utrecht University, we will develop a co-created answer to this question. This question is about far more than environmental protection. Legal systems have long relied on a single kind of story (Chimamanda Adichie 2009): one told in the language of sovereignty, and resource exploitation. But the ocean does not speak this language. Neither do many coastal indigenous peoples, nor the Bedouin custodians of the Sinai coast, the dream fishers communities of Gaza, or the schoolchildren of Songea, Tanzania. If law is to become ecologically responsive and epistemically just, it must first learn to listen differently (Doucet et al. 2025). It must, in a word, be restory-ed. To restory the ocean is therefore not simply to tell new stories about the sea, but to question the stories that have shaped law itself. Our session — experiential as much as informative — weaves together creative methodologies, plural knowledge systems, and the connectivity of the oceans to ask: what would it look like to restory the law?
Before we attempt an answer, a word about where we speak from. We write from Tromsø, at the Arctic edge of Europe, as three scholars of ocean law whose research — and whose friendships — stretch from Sámi fjords to the Amazon, the Red Sea, the coast of Gaza, and the classrooms of Songea. We come to Utrecht with no settled theory, but with a conviction formed over years of working with communities rather than about them: that the ecological crisis of law is, at its root, a crisis of relationship, and that the way back into relationship passes through stories.
That which we have made, we can unmake, then, consciously now, remake.” — Sylvia Wynter
Wynter’s epigraph opened the symposium booklet Restorying the Ocean, illustrated by Sarah Mohamed (swaidraws), whose visual world of ocean dreamcatchers, jellyfish, and coral council animals gives form to ideas that academic prose can only approximate. The booklet was first used at the Copenhagen Conference (organised and chaired by Jingjing Wu, 2026) on Re-thinking Legal Relationality in February 2026, and it forms the creative building block of what we bring to Utrecht.
Three threads, one ocean
Our session draws on three interlocking threads, each rooted in research and fieldwork and co-created knowledge across geographies connected by shared waters and lands.
The sea resist many of the constitutional assumptions upon which modern law has been built: marine species migrate across maritime boundaries, ocean currents flow regardless of the jurisdiction, plastic pollution reach interconnected ecosystems. The ecological reality is organised through relationships rather than borders. This shows us that the ocean is maybe more than an object of protection, but perhaps a teacher of legal imagination and a participant in this new imagined ecological reality. This invites us to think through connectivity, reciprocity, and shared responsibility.
These insights are not new. Long before relationality entered contemporary western legal scholarship, diverse Indigenous peoples across the world understood humans and the more-than-human world as existing within webs of reciprocal responsibilities (Wilson, 2008; Hau’ofa, 1998). While the language of relationality has become increasingly influential in environmental law and legal theory, it should not be mistaken for a concept originating within western scholarship. Rather, it is an imperfect translation of multiple Indigenous legal traditions and epistemologies, each grounded in its own languages, histories, and cosmologies (Sánchez De Jaegher, 2024).
Mana Tugend’s work on legal relationality (2025) builds on these conversations and gives us the loom on which these threads are woven. Rather than treating law as a set of norms imposed from outside on a passive natural world, Tugend invites us to see it as a form of relationship, one that can be re-story-ed when communities, creatures, and coastlines are recognised as participants rather than objects of regulation (2026). This relational lens transforms how we read even the most formal legal instruments: suddenly, a fishing regulation is also a negotiation between a stingray and a council, mediating relationships between human and marine life; a marine protected area becomes a promise made to children not yet born as much as instrument of environmental protection (see Figure 5). Constitutional authority itself begins to appear less as domination and more as the ongoing practice of sustaining relationships.
Co-creating methodologies?
Transforming legal imagination also requires transforming how legal knowledge is produced. Margherita Paola Poto’s co-created methodology (2022) provides the practical grammar for this session. Co-creation is not mere consultation; it is a commitment to building knowledge together through relationships, across difference, in ways that all participants can recognise as their own. Participants become co-authors of legal understanding. This is the spirit of the bLYSs (Ocean Decade Blue Catalyst) project at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, which aims to contribute to ocean literacy with love by 2030, from the Circumpolar North to the communities whose stories are at the heart of this session. Stories, illustrations, and creative practices become methods of inquiry that invite participants to imagine legal relationships before translating them into legal concepts. In this sense, co-creation is a methodology through which ecological constitutionalism can become attentive to voices, experiences, and forms of knowledge that have remained at its margins.
In our symposium, we are planning to develop a co-created episode of the ocean story, picking characters and solving dilemmas (doing the legal work) from the illustrated world co-designed by Sanpo Yokoi, Sarah Mohamed and our communities.
From sovereignty to responsibility?
Endalew Enyew et al (2021) anchors us in the material and legal realities of ocean connectivity. The ocean does not observe national maritime borders. Warming, acidification, plastic drift, and overfishing travel across maritime zones. Neither do coastal Indigenous peoples’ use of ocean space recognize artificial boundaries. However, UNCLOS establishes a geographically fragmented legal regime by dividing ocean space into different maritime zones and enclosing large areas of ocean under the sovereignty or exclusive jurisdiction of coastal States. Such legal construction of ocean space conflicts with the Indigenous peoples’ holistic understanding of ocean space and makes it easier for coastal States to exclude Indigenous peoples from exercising their traditional rights. In line with the normative recognition of the sacredness of water, the interconnectedness of all life, and the importance of protecting the sea, Indigenous peoples’ law provides insights and implementation solutions for the restoration of marine ecosystem. Enyew will take a particular focus on connectivity with respect to Indigenous people’s traditional fishing rights (TFRs), advocating that a new understanding of sovereignty—sovereignty as stewardship— a notion that allows us to understand sovereignty as associated not only with power but also with responsibility, would facilitate effective recognition of the continuity of TFRs of indigenous peoples (Enyew and Bankes, 2026).
Three places all united by co-creation
The creative work produced in and around this project is converging toward something we did not fully plan: a silent book. Wordless, borderless, and deeply relational, the silent book will weave together three geographies united by salt water and the urgency of ecological care. Storytelling enables participants from different cultures, generations, and disciplines to negotiate shared understandings of responsibility without requiring a single authoritative vocabulary.
In this sense, the silent book speaks directly to the constitutional question at the heart of RICE. European ecological constitutionalism has largely been written from within, in the vocabulary of treaties, directives, and rights, a grammar that remains territorial and text-bound. The coasts of Sinai and Gaza, and the schoolchildren of Songea, sit at the edges of that constitutional imagination: connected to Europe by shared waters, histories, and responsibilities, yet largely silent in its legal texts. A wordless book reverses the direction of translation. It does not ask these communities to render themselves legible in Europe’s legal language; it invites European constitutionalism to read what it has so far kept silent.
In each of these contexts, children and community members have been working with character sketches and story prompts, illustrated by Sarah Mohamed and Sanpo Yokoi, to co-create their own stories and understandings of the ocean’s life. The characters include Azhal the parrotfish, Asfour the thousand-year-old shapeshifting guardian, Salama the young reef octopus, Fatima the jellyfish, a Crab who chairs the Coral Reef Council, and a Whale who serves as judge. Each is embedded in a moral ecology: they are not merely cute; they carry responsibilities toward one another and toward the sea itself.
Silences, relationality and the constitutional imagination
Ecological constitutionalism asks us to rethink how constitutional law responds to ecological crises. Yet this transformation cannot be achieved simply by extending constitutional protection to nature. It also requires questioning the stories, and silences, that have shaped constitutional thought itself.
The ocean makes these silences visible. It refuses the territorial logic upon which modern international legal orders are largely built, reminding us that ecological systems are defined by relationships.
What, then, is our understanding of Constitutional Ecology? We offer it tentatively, as one voice in a conversation the RICE community has deliberately left open. For us, Constitutional Ecology is more than ecological constitutionalism — more, that is, than writing nature into existing constitutional texts. It is the reversal of that gesture: reading constitutions ecologically, as living systems of relationship that bind humans, more-than-human beings, and the places they share, and asking what law becomes when relationship, rather than territory, supplies its founding grammar. Where ecological constitutionalism asks how constitutions can protect ecology, Constitutional Ecology asks what ecology can teach constitutions about how to live. This is exactly what our session puts to the test: restorying the ocean is Constitutional Ecology practised from below — one story, one character, one coast at a time.
Read in this light, the outcomes we co-create in Utrecht — the stories, the characters, the silent book itself — are more than illustrations of legal ideas. They are living constitutions in miniature: shared frameworks of meaning, negotiated across difference, that bind their participants in relationships of care and mutual responsibility. Like constitutions, they allocate roles and authority (a Crab chairs the Coral Reef Council; a Whale serves as judge); they articulate founding values (reciprocity, guardianship, care for those not yet born); and they remain open to amendment each time a new voice enters the story. Unlike most constitutions, however, they are not written once and defended thereafter: they live, as ecosystems live, through continuous relation.
For the European Constitutional Ecology that RICE seeks to imagine, the invitation is not to adopt these stories as law, but to learn from their constitutional form. If a constitution is, at its best, the way a community promises itself a future, then a constitutionalism adequate to the ecological crisis must learn to make that promise together with the more-than-human world, and with the communities, within and beyond Europe, that have never stopped making it. We write in pressing times, while the coast of Gaza remains both wound and hope, reefs bleach, and treaties strain; and it is exactly in such times that imagination ceases to be a luxury and becomes a legal method. To restory the ocean is, in the end, to restory the constitution: from a text that speaks, to a relationship that listens.
This blog post may be cited as follows (APA): Tugend, M., Paola Poto, M. and Enyew, E. (2026, July 21) Restorying the Ocean: Co-creating Futures for Law. https://www.uu.nl/en/research/sustainability/impact/project-gallery/sig…