Ecological gaze and unequal subjectivity: a sociological analysis of marine garbage governance

Marine garbage governance overlooks sociocultural and perceptual dynamics shaping waste meanings. This article introduces the concept of the ecological gaze to analyze how visual, moral, and affective relations mediate environmental governance, using a case study of Qingbang Island in Zhoushan, China. We uncover how different actors - including tourists, residents, volunteers, and nonhuman forces (the ocean) - interact through complex systems of visibility and judgment. Through qualitative fieldwork, we identify three key dynamics: performative compliance driven by tourist scrutiny, moral tensions within volunteer engagement, and the symbolic power of the re-entrant gaze of nature. These findings demonstrate that environmental governance is not merely institutional or behavioral, but also visual and relational. The ecological gaze offers a novel analytic for understanding how social inequalities and emotional experiences shape environmental subjectivity and accountability. This framework has broader implications for rethinking governance in ecologically vulnerable and visually mediated contexts.