On February 1, 2023, Sea Shepherd France launched the ninth edition of its marine surveillance operation, “Dolphin Bycatch.” On its very first sortie, the team of volunteers aboard a rigid-hulled inflatable boat filmed a small 10-meter gillnetter with two dolphins caught in its net, at 20 nautical miles off the coast.  Each winter in French Atlantic coastal waters, thousands of dolphins are accidentally caught in fishing nets. These deaths occur within a legal grey zone: while dolphins are strictly protected species, their accidental capture is not prohibited, only regulated through reporting requirements. The result is a troubling paradox: animals protected by law continue to die in large numbers at sea. Specifically, over the past decade, the protection of endangered marine animals has become a central issue of European environmental policy, and in France, the rate of dolphin accidental death by entanglement in fishing gear has risen^[1]. This problem has gradually emerged as a major public concern, not merely as the result of the accumulation of scientific data, but as there has been a sustained effort to raise awareness, establish a legal framework and monitor professional practices at sea. What is further notable, is that the policing related to mammal deaths has now become entangled beyond the state. For example, in southern Brittany, the environmental policing of the sea is no longer carried out by government agents alone. Over the past few years, new actors have entered the scene. Practices including tracking boats at night, filming what happens on deck, using satellite surveillance practices, as well as litigation, have all emerged. Within this new constellation of practices and actors, NGOs, such as Sea Shepherd France, operate on the fringes of legality while actively participating in the monitoring and conservation of marine environments. Based on an ethnography conducted from 2022 to 2024 in Southern Brittany^[2], this essay examines how civil society actors are taking on roles traditionally reserved for government bodies: monitoring, reporting and classifying environmental offences, and sometimes contributing directly to the enforcement of the law. Far from being limited to a militant critique of public inaction, what one finds is that these practices contribute to reshaping the practical organization of environmental policing at sea as part of larger patterns in the diminishing of state interventions and the simultaneous proliferation of questions about the boundaries and utility of maritime jurisdictions.

Protected, yet killed: The paradox of French dolphin conservation

The mass strandings of dolphins observed along the French Atlantic coast since the mid-2010s have led to a growing body of scientific evidence documenting the impact of non-selective fishing methods (particularly gillnets and pelagic trawls). Although bycatch is legally tolerated (it is only mandatory to declare the accidental captures), its scale – several thousand individuals killed per year – contradicts the protected status of cetaceans^[3]. This regulatory contradiction serves as the starting point for an NGO movement aimed at transforming diffuse ecological damage into an environmental violation that can be addressed politically and legally. 

The nets of a small fishing boat, Concarneau harbour.

Frictions between fishers and marine mammals are not new. The disciplines of history and anthropology show how marine mammals and humans have competed for the same resources for millennia – fish – and operated within the same maritime spaces. What has changed in recent decades is the environmental political context in which these interactions occur. Since the early 2000s, marine conservation policies have expanded significantly across French maritime jurisdictions. Instruments originally designed for land – such as protected areas – have been extended offshore, as in marine protected areas. Today, large portions of coastal fishing zones in southern Brittany fall within marine parks, Natura 2000 sites, or natural reserves. These conservation frameworks coexist with other spatial claims, including offshore wind farms and other “blue economy” projects. The fishers’ workplaces have become a multi-use, regulated, and monitored space, where ecological concerns increasingly shape access, practices, and legitimacy. In this context, marine mammals, especially grey seals and dolphins, have become emblematic of the success of environmental politics. In fact, their populations have rebounded thanks to decades of legal protection. For many small-scale fishers, these animals represent bureaucratic constraints and no longer simply part of their working seascape and environment.

Judicializing the Ocean: Challenging the State’s environmental failure

As environmental traceability requirements and tighter regulation of fishing practices have expanded, they have not been sufficient to halt the rising mortality of marine mammals along the French Atlantic coast. Faced with this persistent failure, environmental NGOs have increasingly sought to hold the state accountable for its inability to effectively regulate and protect marine ecosystems. This repositioning reflects a broader transformation in French oceanic activism, where litigation becomes not just a complementary tool, but a central mode of intervention. Sea Shepherd France has embraced an intensive litigation strategy inspired by its Anglo-Saxon roots: multiplying legal actions, intervening as a civil party in numerous cases, and pursuing both individuals and public authorities. In 2019, alongside a coalition of environmental NGOs, Sea Shepherd France filed a complaint with the European Union against France for failing to comply with environmental regulations governing fisheries. At the same time, Sea Shepherd France initiated a separate legal action before the administrative court in Paris, directly challenging the French state’s responsibility in the absence of effective measures to prevent dolphin deaths. This case marked a turning point. In July 2020, the court recognized that the State had failed to act with sufficient diligence and acknowledged the “moral damage” suffered by Sea Shepherd France, awarding financial compensation. While modest in scale, such recognition carries important symbolic and strategic weight. It affirms the legitimacy of NGOs to act in defense of ecological interests and establishes the possibility of holding the state accountable not only for direct harm, but also for regulatory inaction. Then, a series of decisions by the Council of State between 2020 and 2024 recognized the inadequacy of measures taken to limit bycatch and led to temporary closures of fishing zones during the winter. These decisions have had tangible effects on the organization of fishers’ work: the grounding of vessels, the implementation of compensation schemes, and the restructuring of the economy. In this process, NGOs emerge as central actors in environmental regulation, capable of translating scientific knowledge into legal obligations and imposing practical constraints on productive activities. They thus contribute to the redefinition of legitimate professional standards.

Policing the Ocean

For Sea Shepherd France, however, litigation is only one part of a broader strategy. Legal victories, while significant, remain insufficient without effective enforcement. The organization has repeatedly emphasized the gap between regulatory decisions and their implementation at sea. In response, Sea Shepherd France has developed localized forms of environmental policing.  Traditionally, the regulation of French fisheries focused on economic and resource management – quotas, gear, and territorial rules. Today, enforcement increasingly includes biodiversity protection, animal welfare, and ecosystem monitoring. This shift expands both the scope of infractions and the actors involved in identifying them. One of the most striking developments is the growing role of non-state actors in surveillance. While originally known for high-seas activism, Sea Shepherd France has, since 2018, developed coastal monitoring operations in France. Its activities include documenting fishing practices, collecting visual evidence, tracking vessels using geolocation tools, and submitting detailed reports to authorities Sea Shepherd France charters vessels on which volunteers, often made up of highly skilled volunteers in their thirties living together on land for the duration of the campaign, take turns patrolling at night. Activists follow trawlers a few miles offshore, tracking them using GPS navigation tools, recording registration numbers, and systematically photographing or filming net-hauling operations. When dolphins are brought up in the nets, video footage is edited by the crew and shared on social media. For instance, in August 2020, Sea Shepherd France volunteers filmed a fishing vessel hauling its nets off the southern coast of Brittany. The footage showed five dead dolphins brought onboard within a 24-hour period. Sea Shepherd alerted the maritime gendarmerie, which inspected the vessel upon its return to the port of Le Guilvinec. Authorities confirmed that four accidental captures had been officially reported. “We are therefore entitled to suspect that the vessel only made these declarations because the captures were filmed by Sea Shepherd,” the organization’s president stated in the press. In practice, this means that NGOs are no longer simply advocating for environmental protection. They are actively producing evidence and feeding into investigative processes. 

This shift reflects the structural limits of state enforcement at sea: vast maritime spaces, limited resources, and the inherent difficulty of proving environmental violations. By filling these gaps, NGOs help improve the detection of infractions and push authorities to enforce existing laws.^[4] Indeed, a representative of local maritime police explains that Sea Shepherd can assist with their investigative work: “We have a good relationship with them; we’ve met with the director in Paris. Everyone has a role to play, and we work with them. […] They help reduce the number of violations.” But in doing so, they also blur the boundaries between activism, surveillance, and policing.  

For many fishers, this new configuration is deeply unsettling. Sea Shepherd is not perceived as a neutral observer, but as an adversary. The representatives argue that environmental regulations disproportionately target small-scale, coastal operations, while industrial fleets – often more damaging in ecological terms – escape scrutiny. In this view, environmental policing becomes socially selective. This critique is not new. Marine communities have long distinguished between “small” and “big” actors. But today, the target of this critique is shifting. It is no longer directed only at the State or large corporations, but also at NGOs perceived as allies of regulatory institutions and conservation policies that restrict access to marine resources. From this perspective, organizations like Sea Shepherd are seen not as defenders of the ocean, but as agents of control, contributing to the surveillance and criminalization of artisanal fishing.

A graffiti targeting Sea Shepherd, Concarneau harbour.

Conclusion 

Oceanic conservation operates at the intersection of law, activism, and everyday work at sea. While it strengthens the protection of marine life, it also raises critical questions about fairness, justice, equity, legitimacy, and power. Understanding these dynamics requires moving beyond simple oppositions between “fishers” and “environmentalists.” Instead, it calls for attention to the complex ways in which ecological, legal, and social worlds overlap – and sometimes collide – in the contemporary ocean.  Sea Shepherd France appears to operate across multiple registers of legitimacy: confrontation, to generate media attention, and tactical cooperation with authorities – carefully avoiding legal thresholds that could expose it to prosecution. This strategic flexibility shows that environmental policing becomes a distributed system, where the state retains the power to sanction, but relies – formally or informally – on a network of actors to observe, report, and alert.  By documenting harm, producing evidence, and triggering legal proceedings, Sea Shepherd does more than challenge the state’s monopoly over environmental enforcement – it actively contributes to shaping what counts, in practice, as an environmental offense. Their interventions, accepted by local authorities, can intensify conflicts and contribute to perceptions of blue injustice.

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About the author:

Gaëlle Ronsin is associate professor in sociology and anthropology at Marie and Louis Pasteur University, researcher at Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), and associated at the University of Quebec in Rimouski (Canada). Her research focuses on nature conservation policies and social movements. Her recent fieldworks focused on the ecologisation of marine environments and the judicialisation of nature and animals in France and Canada. She coordinates a collective project named “Ocean diplomacy ethnography” (https://www.odipe.org/). She is also interested in (marine) food-related issues.

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