Becoming an Ocean State: Shaping the Future of Mauritius Through a Post-humanist Paradigm Shift in Higher Education

According to the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, Mauritius is among the top fifteen countries with the largest marine-to-land area ratio. Though Mauritius can exercise full sovereignty over this large ocean area (at least in theory), it is felt that higher education actors have yet to fully grasp the oceanic potential to transform the future of the country. This chapter argues that there should be a paradigm shift to a post-humanist higher education curriculum that would provide the philosophical underpinning for Mauritians to appreciate their ocean territory. Indeed, just adding study programmes at the university level addressing marine sciences would not necessarily bring the desired change. A rethink of higher education curricula appears necessary to promote a shift from conceptualisations of the human as a separate entity from nature, the ocean in this case. Moreover, in the context of climatic crises, it is crucial to understand that we are inextricably linked to our environment. For Mauritius, the ocean poses many threats to livelihoods in terms of sea level rise, more violent cyclones and depletion of marine resources. However, the ocean is also a source of energy, food and host to protective barriers such as coral reefs. To be able to live with and probably one day live within the ocean, we have to move away from understanding the environment only in terms of the use-value to humans. Higher education must promote new ontologies that see humans and the environment as mutually entangled. The chapter proposes the theoretical lens of ecological posthumanism that could underpin our higher education future. The authors have produced data from desk research on higher education offerings in Mauritius to gauge Mauritius’ conceptualisation of an Ocean State.