You’re about to embark on your long-awaited Caribbean cruise vacation, beginning at the Port of Miami, destined to stop by the elegant and exclusive Cayman Islands. After cruising for two days, you spot Grand Cayman Island, surrounded by turquoise blue waters, lush vegetation and colorful buildings. The ship stops just before the island and anchors its position. A smaller boat comes to greet you at the bottom of the cruise ship's stairs, where you are taken onboard the small vessel. With the wind whipping in your hair and the ocean at your fingertips, you travel less than ten minutes before the small boat docks at the George Town Cruise Port. You disembark and are excited to begin your visit to Grand Cayman and indulge in the so-called “CaymanKind” experience, or the well-known warmth of the Caymanian people, and all that it has to offer. You hop into a taxi and begin your adventures swimming with stingrays at Stingray City, exploring crystal caves and relaxing at Seven Mile Beach. You return to George Town Harbour earlier than expected and observe visitors and locals alike snorkeling close to the port. You rent a mask, snorkel and fins, and directly from the port, snorkel the reefs surrounding the harbor, which are teeming with fish and pristine coral reefs. This concludes your visit to the Cayman Islands and you get in line to board the small boat to return to the cruise ship. Just before you embark on the small vessel, you snap an idyllic picture of the towering cruise ship from afar, resting neatly atop the crystal blue waters.

The Cayman Islands and Its Harbor

This would be a general experience that many cruise passengers would have visiting the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands consist of three Caribbean islands: Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac. They lie directly south of Florida, approximately 450 miles away. They are a self-governing United Kingdom overseas territory. As such, they must comply with some international commitments and regulations as well as their own. The Cayman Islands have a population of just over 67,000 people, most of whom reside on Grand Cayman. Finance and tourism are the two economic pillars of the Cayman Islands.

The concept of a pristine coral reef, untouched and unspoiled, feels like a thing of the past. While we know they must exist and hear stories about their majestic beauty, they feel far away. Depending upon how you define a healthy coral reef, it is debatable if the word “pristine” accurately describes coral reefs at all. While beautiful and intact reef ecosystems certainly exist, are these reefs truly unspoiled? They may encounter the odd abandoned piece of fishing gear, the curious lack of a once abundant fish species or unseasonably warm ocean temperatures. Thus, are these places still pristine, or have they shifted to become something new?

Many people might not know that until fairly recently, they could find a healthy tropical coral reef at the southern tip of Florida in the United States. Until the 1980s, this 360 linear mile barrier reef—the Florida Reef Tract—was world-renowned as a premier dive site, showcasing rich collections of species (known as assemblages) and dense coral cover. In fact, the Florida Reef Tract is the third-largest barrier reef in the world.

Growing up in South Florida in the 1990s, stands of elkhorn coral on the reefs of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) were expected to be seen on dives, with their yellow, branching arms stretching through the clear water upward toward the light. In summer of 2022, while on a research dive, I recall crying out and pointing to a stand of elkhorn to a student simply because it has become such a rare sight in this short time, that it warrants a celebration.

Over the last 40–50 years, close to 90 percent of the living coral cover that comprised the Florida Reef Tract has been lost (Figure 5.1), and new species assemblages have begun to take their place (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2022; Toth et al., 2019). Due to these significant changes, new forms of management have emerged to try and conserve what coral remains.

In this chapter, we explore two of the most visible and important case studies of coral reef management institutions from southern Florida: the case of the FKNMS and the case of the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative (SEFCRI).

Stakeholder-driven Participatory Management Highlighted through Case Studies

Worldwide, coral reef management is increasingly becoming more participatory and drawing on adaptive management. As a reminder, participatory management refers to a form of management that shares the authority and responsibility of managing natural resources between the government and local communities and stakeholder groups (Kar, 2021). An important aspect is that it incorporates participatory governance which promotes and empowers the people (citizens and non-citizens alike) to participate in the decision-making process (). Often, only entities that significantly affect or are significantly affected by the proposed decision participate. Throughout this book, we’ve defined these entities as stakeholders (Decker et al., 2012). Our five case studies showcased stakeholder-driven policy-making at the national level through bipartisan legislation in the United States, at the sub-national level through participatory management in Florida, and at the local level through grassroots movements in Florida and the Cayman Islands, with Florida reefs depicted in Figure 10.1.

Our case study on bipartisan legislation in the United States showed that Republicans and Democrats are using coral reefs as symbols in policy-making to collaborate and cooperate on legislation regarding climate-vulnerable ecosystems and the impacts from climate change. For example, coral reefs are symbols of the unique cultural settings of American states across the nation. For Hawaii and Florida, coral reefs represent unique identities and are tied to their livelihoods and way of life. We also find that there is bipartisan consensus on the need to protect and conserve coral reef ecosystems through community-based management programs funded and supported by the federal government. This means that Congressional leaders are buying into the importance of enabling local communities to play a role in stewarding their coral reefs.

Our case study on the management of Florida's coral reefs examined two organizations: the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) and the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative (SEFCRI). We found that both organizations enacted participatory management styles via stakeholder engagement and involvement. We also found evidence of iteratively learning, or learning as they go, from both organizations, indicating adaptive management strategies. Finally, we identified that the FKNMS engages in a formal and centralized approach to managing the Florida Reef Tract, while SEFCRI engages in an informal and collaborative approach to managing Florida's northern reefs.

Data analysis provided by Research Assistant Kampol Pannoi

In 2021, a group of prominent Democratic and Republican lawmakers from the bicameral U.S. legislature, or Congress, came together to call for new policy to defend American coral reefs from environmental change. In the words of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, “I saw the devastated condition of our coral reefs firsthand when touring the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and I promised a comprehensive response.” His perceptions on stressors to reefs and the need for their proposed policy, the Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, was nearly indistinguishable from his Democratic colleagues. Given how polarized American politics have been for the past decade, it is important to understand why lawmakers come together and agree upon the urgent need to protect coral reefs from stressors? Is there something inherently special to coral reefs that causes elected leaders to put aside typical partisan grudges and work together to ensure laws are passed to guarantee American reefs survive the era of climate change?

This chapter will review the history of coral reef policy in the U.S. Congress, including a focus on policies that had congressional support from both political parties, and a specific case of reauthorizing the fundamental coral reef conservation law in the United States. We argue that understanding why legislators decide to place coral reefs on the policy-making agenda is important for biodiversity conservation, but may also be a source of common ground over more contentious issues, such as the passing of climate change legislation. Our results can help interest groups message the importance of biodiversity and climate policy to lawmakers in a way that appeals to a range of political ideologies.

History of Coral Reef Policy in the U.S. Congress

The federal government of the United States is broken up into three branches of government: the Executive Branch, which is where the president and federal agencies carry out laws; the Legislative Branch, where laws are made in Congress; and the Judicial Branch, where laws are judged based on whether they follow the U.S. constitution. Congress is made up of two chambers or houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is the lower house, which is generally characterized by early career politicians with more frequent elections every two years who represent a district within a U.S. state based on population.

Imagine the hustle and bustle of downtown Miami, teeming with live music, filled with flavors of Latin American cuisine, aromas of Cuban coffee and tourists and locals alike enjoying miles of pristine white-sand beaches. A short distance to the south, lies the Biscayne Bay, which is home to several listed species under the most important wildlife conservation policy on the books, the Endangered Species Act, including manatees, crocodiles, several sea turtle species, small-tooth sawfish and staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis). Just a couple miles down the road on U.S. Route 1, the heart of the coral reefs of South Florida, or the Florida Reef Tract can be found where it stretches 300 miles south to the Dry Tortugas National Park, making it the third largest barrier in the world. To the west of Miami, we find Everglades National Park, which is a designated World Heritage site with one of the most unique wetland ecosystems in the world. Everglades National Park is also one of the wettest regions in the United States, with many of its waterways finding their final destination in the Biscayne Bay, and ultimately into the Florida Reef Tract ecosystem, showing the interconnectedness of all of these South Florida ecosystems. These tropical coastal seascape ecosystems are characterized by seven connected ecosystems that include coastal strand, mangroves, seagrass beds, coral reefs, hard-bottom habitat, silt-bottom habitat and rocky-bottom habitat. Right in the middle of this mosaic of ecosystems lies the Port of Miami, nicknamed the “Gateway to the Americas” and “Cruise Capital of the World.” In this chapter we explore how major infrastructure projects may degrade delicate and imperiled coastal ecosystems despite strict federal, state and local laws, and how people and interest groups are working to protect these ecosystems.

The Dredging History of the Port of Miami

To meet the demands of the burgeoning market, the Port of Miami has undergone many dredging projects to accommodate larger shipping vessels and cruise ships throughout its history. Beginning in 1990, Congress authorized the deepening of the Port to 42 feet, which was completed in 1993. Since then, every 10 to 15 years, another port expansion dredging project has been implemented.

These threats described in Chapter 2 have led to the tragic loss of nearly 50 percent of reef-building corals worldwide in the past 30 years, and their status continues to decline (Bruno & Selig, 2007; Côté et al., 2005; De’ath et al., 2012, Eddy et al., 2021; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2019). We are currently in a coral reef crisis with one-third of our reefs threatened with extinction (IUCN, 2021). According to the latest Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network report (2021), from 1978 to 1997, the world's stony coral populations remained relatively stable, accounting for approximately 32 percent of reef cover, meaning that when you look at the seafloor when swimming along a reef, you see about one-third of the bottom covered in hard coral species. However, in 1998, a mass coral bleaching event resulted in the loss of 8 percent of that cover, though the reefs were able to rebound back to ∼33 percent by 2009. Since 2009 however, there has been a steady decline in stony coral cover globally and a shift from coral-dominated reefs to algal-dominated ones, with various species of algae supplanting the space on the seafloor where the stony corals used to be (Scouter et al., 2021a). Algae and coral fight for the same habitat as both need similar conditions, especially exposure to sunlight (Swierts & Vermeij, 2016). From 2009 to 2018, we lost 13.5 percent (4,579 square miles) of stony coral cover worldwide—the equivalent of losing all stony corals on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (Scouter et al., 2021a). In contrast, algae cover on reefs, an indicator of stressed coral reefs, has increased by 20 percent in 2019 when compared to 2010, and the coral-to-algae ratio continues to increase in favor of algae. This is dire for the people who live next to reefs and depend on them for livelihoods. When people board an airplane and fly across the world to go diving, they do so for the coral species that are rapidly disappearing.

Caribbean Region

Coral cover and loss have varied across Earth's regions and time periods. The earliest observations of significant coral loss were documented in the Caribbean (Côté et al., 2005; Cramer et al., 2021). The Caribbean region represents ∼7 percent of the world's reefs (Jackson et al., 2014). Some of the largest barrier reefs in the world are found in the Caribbean Sea.

Acknowledgments: Data analysis and quality assurance of data provided by Research Assistants Catherine Cummings, Gregory Johnson, Danielle Oates, Vincent Rivers, Trinity Russo, Caroline Ward, Jordan Windham

What Are Ecosystem Services?

Just after my fifth birthday, my father took me fishing for the first time. He set my tiny Mickey Mouse fishing rod on the dock and did his best to explain to me the fundamentals of freshwater fishing. Hooks, bobbers and bait were the subjects at hand. It seemed very complicated, but I eagerly nodded my head as though I understood the lessons he was teaching me. I was certainly more interested in the excitement of pulling a live fish from the depths than learning the techniques needed to accomplish this feat.

He showed me how to carefully put a worm on the hook, and I was ready to go. I dropped the line in the water and expected a quick bite. Nothing. The minutes crept by, and it seemed the fish had much less interest than I did. My attention span waned as I sat waiting for something to bite. I began to look around. I heard the water lapping against the dock. The birds calling to one another from the shrubs and trees lining the pond. I smelled the warm Alabama breeze and admired the clouds lazily drifting overhead. There was so much happening, and yet nothing was happening all at once. As the morning turned to afternoon, it was obvious that the fish were not interested in our bait, and we left the pond without catching a thing.

While it's true that we weren't able to get a fish, all was not lost. Something else had stirred in my young mind. For the first time in my life, I felt connected to something more. I was only a tiny piece of something greater, something far more connected than I could comprehend at the time. Even though we didn't catch anything, I wanted more. I found value in the connectedness and the beauty of the Alabama ecosystem. I felt like a fisherman. I will always fondly remember this morning on the dock with my father as the first time I truly felt like I had an identity beyond that of a child.

Methods

Case selection and research design

The proposed New Cruise Berthing Facility project in the Cayman Islands was selected as the case study for this research. This port infrastructure project was selected because, in the years following its announcement in 2013, an environmental dispute between two coalitions (over the potential economic benefits versus environmental impact) arose and continues to this day. Both coalitions ran sophisticated campaigns that pushed their policy beliefs to persuade the public and government to proceed with or cancel the project. The project's threat to adjacent coral reefs and an unprecedented outcome of an indefinite halt of the project, mobilized by the non-dominant coalition, make this case of special interest.

This research uses a critical case-study research design to gain in-depth and contextual insights into a complex and contemporary issue (Yin, 2018). This case qualifies as a critical case because understanding how coalitions are formed to contest infrastructure projects that threaten coral reefs is important for future environmental disputes and is not limited to coral reef conservation. A qualitative approach to content analysis is used, wherein the researchers collect document data from local newspapers to identify coalition properties and the occurrences of policy change and learning. The Advocacy Coalition Framework is used with deductive logic to thematically code and analyze data (Saldaña, 2016).

Data collection

A total of 420 news articles were collected as the data for this book. Articles were collected from two local newspapers: The Cayman News Service and the Cayman Compass. Newspaper sources were chosen because the port project overtook national headlines for seven years with stories running almost daily for weeks at a time between 2018 and 2019. The Cayman News Service and The Cayman Compass were chosen because they are the two prominent online local newspapers in the Cayman Islands. While many articles were neutral, the Cayman News Service emphasized the views of and expressed support for the anti-port coalition, while the Cayman Compass (to a lesser extent) supported the pro-port coalition. The earliest article was dated on June 8, 2015 and the latest on September 9, 2021. n = 308 articles exist under the tag “cruise dock facility” in the Cayman News Service, of which n = 283 were included.

Theoretical Framework

To best conceptualize the importance of cultural ecosystem services, and the values they hold for the people who rely on these ecosystems, we must clearly define some of the key terms outlined in our theoretical framework, derived from Fish et al., 2016. In this framework the fundamental building block for understanding how cultural ecosystem services and the benefits they provide work in tandem. It begins with the biophysical domain in which humans interact with their environment. The biophysical domain is defined as nature's condition and ecological functioning (independent of interactions with people/benefits/services). Stated simply, the biophysical domain provides the material components of the environmental spaces where these interactions take place. Additionally, the biophysical domain provides opportunities for the various cultural practices enabled by environmental spaces. The environmental spaces and cultural practices (described in further detail below) both work to shape the biophysical domain. In the Cayman Islands, the reefs in Georgetown Harbour being threatened or lost by the port expansion project are the biophysical domain and the environmental spaces being examined in this chapter.

Environmental spaces are defined as the physical locations or sites in which humans and the societies and cultures they populate, interact within the eco-system. This can include meadows, streams, mountain tops, and in the context of the Cayman Islands, the beaches and reefs surrounding the islands. These spaces provide a context for the linking of the biophysical domain with cultural practices and cultural ecosystem benefits, as these spaces shape the biophysical domain and enable cultural practices and benefits.

In the case of the Cayman Islands, a majority of the environmental spaces which provide these benefits are reefs, beaches, lagoons and other marine environments surrounding the islands. Popular locations around the three islands (Grand Cayman, Little Cayman and Cayman Brac) include Eden Rock, Devil's Grotto, Macabuca, Cheeseburger Reef, Seven Mile Beach and the USS Kittiwake.

Methods

This study was distributed via an online platform (Google Forms) through the Cayman Islands National Trust which posted the link to the survey on their social media on November 1, 2019. The survey had n = 175 responses, which is a very small portion of the Caymanian population, but with information saturation on topics such as the form of reef access that Caymanian's prefer.

In 2019 I was working for a small non-profit on the northern coast of Haiti, near the port city of Cap-Haïtien. Historically, Cap-Haïtien was nicknamed The Paris of the Antilles for its great wealth and beauty as a former French Colony (see figure 1.1) (Liss & Knight, 1991). Today, Cap-Haïtien remains quite beautiful, retaining much of its colonial-era architecture, which is now steeped in vibrant Haitian culture and nestled between lush mountains and a sprawling turquoise bay. My work there involved coral reef restoration, or replanting coral to help bring the reef back to its former glory, and thus the brilliant blue waters are where I spent most of my time. Despite Haiti's rugged beauty, environmental degradation is abundant, and its coral reefs are heavily impacted. Much of the loss of coral reefs is due to there being a lack of ways to manage waste, pollution, overfishing, coastal development and a lack of cohesive environmental governance, which we define as political management combining government, non-profits, public participation and private-sector interests (Creary et al., 2008). Governance and government are not the same things, and this distinction is necessary for our book's central arguments to unfold. Government intervention includes actions like a fish and wildlife agency instituting catch-limit regulations on a fishery, whereas governance includes the activities of other actors such as communities, businesses and non-governmental organizations or NGOs (Lemos & Agrawal, 2006).

On an otherwise tranquil morning dive, I began to witness these impacts firsthand. A large shadow passed slowly over me, which turned out to not be a floating patch of Sargassum, a genus of seaweed commonly found in the Caribbean. Instead, it was an enormous floating mass of single-use plastics, such as the small yellow plastic vinegar bottles typical of Haiti (see figure 1.2). This marine debris had washed down from the mountains during a storm the night before, and was symbolic of the immense challenges facing Haitian coral reefs. Beachgoers as far as Corpus Christi, Texas, in the United States commonly find these same yellow vinegar bottles washed up on Gulf of Mexico beaches nearly 3,000 kilometers away, with missing diamond shapes, from bites taken from the bottles by sea turtles. The interconnectedness between coastal communities can often be traced in such a way.

Methods

Data included meeting minutes (i.e., transcripts recorded during advisory council/committee meetings), news documents (including newspaper articles, press releases, newspaper blogs and news transcripts), and remote interviews with representatives and participating stakeholders from the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Using the appearance of mass coral bleaching events along the Florida Reef Tract as a temporal threshold, denoting a shift from historical to contemporary ecosystem functionality and management needs, I compiled a total of 1,122 individual data points (n = 1,122) from both organizations, FKNMS (n = 541) and SEFCRI (n = 581), throughout the summer of 2021.

News document data were collected from the Nexis Uni database, which initially revealed over 10,000 results when searching “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” or “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative.” However, many of these results were irrelevant within the scope of this study; therefore, modifiers were added to narrow the search results. First, for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, 179 documents were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” AND “management.” These results were then filtered using the category “Newspapers” and the date range “1996 - present.” The reason I focused on newspaper articles was to make the amount of FKNMS news data more manageable. Additionally, 1996 was selected as a starting point because the first mass bleaching event to occur in Florida after the creation of the FKNMS was in 1997. Of the 179 results, 79 were deemed relevant to this study, and 100 were excluded. The results were manually sorted to determine their relevance to this research. Any articles that were outside the scope of this study were therefore excluded. For example, one article focused on new funding for habitat restoration in the Everglades National Park and mentioned both the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and “management” in that context. However, this had no direct relevance to the management of the Florida Reef Tract (Wadlow, 2010).

Second, for the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative, 99 results were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative” OR “SEFCRI” OR “Ecosystem Conservation Area.” Because SEFCRI is a newer organization (established in 2003), there was no need to limit the date range.

In the face of rapid global environmental change, there has been an interdisciplinary movement among scientists to reconsider how ecosystems are managed. Governing in the Anthropocene, or the age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the Earth's climate and environment, comes with novel considerations. As the human population continues to grow, interactions between people and the environment are becoming more common and more complicated. These interactions are often described as socio-ecological systems, or the relationships between linked human and natural systems (Folke, 2006; Folke et al., 2005; Ostrom, 2009; Walker et al., 2004).

Due to the fact that coastal communities rely on coral reef ecosystems, the relationships between them are important to consider as a single socio-ecological system (Cinner et al., 2012; Cinner et al., 2016; Kittinger et al., 2016). This means that impacts to the reef, through human action or natural change, can come back to impact human systems like economies and cultures. For example, fishermen access a reef for different species, such as conch, lobster, snapper and grouper. These different anglers might overlap in their target areas, limiting the ability of other reef users, such as divers, to view these species. People looking to develop stretches of the coastline for condos may clear coastal dunes, resulting in cloudier water that inhibits both angler and diver activity. A member of the public that may never even see a reef firsthand might place a high value on a healthy reef merely existing so that they can be passed down to their children. Decision-makers are tasked with understanding these overlapping uses, and designing management systems to balance uses while maintaining essential features of the reef ecosystem.

Dr. Elinor Ostrom, a pioneer of the socio-ecological system concept, likens the complexity of a resource system to the complexity of a biological organism, where many subsystems interact to produce feedback loops which compose a greater whole (Ostrom, 2009). While the idea of a socio-ecological system was initially developed to help explain the interconnected nature of people and their environment, it has since become a staple within the field of natural resources management being applied to topics as diverse as cattle ranching, forestry and coral reef conservation (Berkes et al., 2000; Fischer, 2018; Herrero-Jáuregui et al., 2018; Pendleton et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2004).

Methods

Case selection

The 2015 Port of Miami dredging project in Florida, United States, was the selected case study for this research. An environmental dispute emerged due to the organization of local stakeholders who were concerned over the uncertainty over ecological impacts of these projects on reefs. The project took place in Miami, which is a popular destination in the tropics, whose economy is strongly tied to trade and the tourism industry. Furthermore, the port project takes place in a wealthy location based on gross domestic products and has institutions and resources that allow for coalitions to emerge. We apply the Narrative Policy Framework as the theoretical lens to assess how narrative strategies were used to influence policy outcomes regarding these port projects.

Research design

The case study is the research design for this study, and it is appropriate because it allows the researcher an in-depth investigation to answer why and how decisions were made, examines contemporary events over which the researcher has no control over and enables multiple sources of data to converge toward an explanation (Yin, 2018). The project specifically uses a case-study design and mixed methods to provide more rigorous and robust findings (Creswell & Clark, 2019; Johnson et al., 2007; Yin, 2018). Mixed methods research is when a researcher combines qualitative and quantitative elements of research methods and integrates multiple forms of data (Creswell & Clark, 2019). We collected document and interview data from local stakeholders involved in the port project to identify the narrative strategies that were employed.

Data collection

For the Port of Miami case study, data were collected from four sources: the Nexis Uni database, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), Jacksonville District news archive, the Miami WaterKeeper press and blog archive, and the World Access News database. A total of n = 103 documents were collected, which consisted of news releases, articles and position statements. Using the search terms “Miami” and “Deep Dredge Project” between 2010 and 2020 in Nexis Uni resulted in n = 65 documents. This date range was chosen because political leaders announced the start of the deep dredge project in 2010, and even though the project was completed in 2015, coral mortality reports and papers were published from 2016 to 2019.

Research Methods

Research design

This case study uses an exploratory sequential research design, where qualitative data is collected first, followed by quantitative analysis to further our understanding of qualitative results (Yin, 2009). The purpose behind exploratory sequential-design studies is that the qualitative findings can inform the quantitative model and in our case become a new theoretical framework for why lawmakers support coral conservation policy (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2018). We used qualitative methods to characterize the messages and themes that political entrepreneurs used to describe their rationale for supporting bipartisan coral reef conservation bills. Quantitative analysis of these statements examines (1) whether there were significant differences between Republicans and Democrats over the ways they framed the problem; and (2) whether support for these bills (i.e., co-sponsorship and “yea” roll-call votes) could be predicted by representatives’ jurisdictions being located in coastal zones and/or adjacent to coral reefs. Roll-call votes occur when a representative or senator votes “yea” or “nay,” so that the names of members voting on each side are recorded, compared to voice votes which do not record the stance taken by individual members (U.S. Senate, 2021). Thus, the qualitative findings (how lawmakers defined the problem) informs the quantitative analysis (differences in message content across political parties and spatial/political party variables of interest). We added the spatial variables after recognizing that a compelling alternative explanation for support for coral reef legislation may come from the fact that congressional political entrepreneurs may live next to and therefore care more about coral reef ecosystems, regardless of political party or long-term political ideology. Overall, we are theorizing why lawmakers cross party lines to support conservation legislation for climate-vulnerable ecosystems. Understanding this rationale may help enact future bipartisan climate policy.

Qualitative sampling logic

To understand how policy entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs discussed their rationale for supporting these bills (a process that we conceptualize as “defining the problem in the problem stream”), we collected all statements made on The Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, the Tropical Forest and Coral Reef Conservation Reauthorization Act, and the Offshore Wind for Territories Act. Statements were collected from the Nexis Uni Database, Congressional Record archive on congress .go v, and on the social media platform Twitter for statements made by relevant legislators, NGOs and other members of civil society.