| Summary: | Despite harmful impacts on coastal communities and biodiversity for a few decades, eutrophication of marine systems only recently gained public visibility. Representing a major land-based pollution, it is now considered as the most striking symptom of intractable disruption of biogeochemical nutrients cycles at a global scale, due to massive phosphate ore extraction and industrial synthesis of reactive nitrogen. The ambition of this article is to account for the protracted emergence of coastal eutrophication as a public problem. Based on a comprehensive literature review of previously dispersed works in sustainability, social and political sciences, the article analyses multi-scale dynamics of ocean overfertilization. We show that the experience of local people was usually insufficient to trigger stringent public policies, since the lack of effective public action was often presented as the result of local antagonisms and persistent scientific uncertainties, and identify three stages that characterize the social history of marine eutrophication and how it was handled – or not – by public authorities. Although social mobilizations against coastal eutrophication tend to focus on emblematic sites, socio-environmental conflicts directly related to eutrophication symptoms spread in diverse hydro-social configurations. Ultimately, we develop a typology of four configurations associated with enduring land-based nutrient pollution : noisy, overwhelming, silenced and disturbing eutrophication.
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