Arts-led co-creation in contested coastal futures

Abstract Coastal social-ecological systems face intensifying pressures from climate change, extractive industries, and competing claims to space and resources. These conflicts carry profound justice dimensions about who benefits from coastal resources and whose knowledge counts in decision-making. Beyond technical management challenges, we can view these as contested futures where different groups envision fundamentally different possibilities for places and communities. While sustainability science has increasingly turned to arts-based approaches, important gaps persist in understanding how artistic engagement actually operates in practice. Most studies analyze creative outputs while leaving the generative process itself under examined. Through reflexive analysis of arts-led co-creation in three contested coastal settings—embroidery workshops with displaced women in Bangladesh, stop-motion animation with fishing communities in Brazil, and documentary filmmaking with Indigenous cultural practitioners in Hawaii—we identify three interwoven orientations that characterized our work: relational co-creation, pluriversal attunement, and collective imagination. We discuss these as cultivable sensibilities that shaped how we navigated collaboration in contested contexts. Our analysis reveals how these orientations unfolded through specific practices, what they enabled, and where they met limits. By opening the co-creative process as a site of inquiry, we contribute practice-based evidence of how arts-led work actually unfolds in contested coastal contexts.