Strategic dialogues like the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue are tools of India's maritime diplomacy. How can academic and scientific cooperation strengthen regional resilience?

The Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue (IPRD) is the Indian Navy's annual apex-level international strategic dialogue, with the National Maritime Foundation as its knowledge partner. IPRD-2026 focused on turning scientific knowledge into lasting regional cooperation [1]. This shows that India's maritime diplomacy now treats knowledge as a shared resource for resilience.

IPRD as a tool of maritime diplomacy

• Coalition-building: Session-1 speakers came from France, Indonesia, Japan and Maldives. The Sahyog Ka Samvaad session hosted envoys of Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Norway [1].
• Track-1.5 trust-building: officials and experts meet informally before formal deals. White-shipping agreements share only unclassified data and are "not security pacts" [2], so they depend on this prior trust.
• Island-state outreach: the Indian Ocean Commission presented its views on protecting critical maritime infrastructure [1].

How academic and scientific cooperation builds resilience

• Shared Maritime Domain Awareness: pooled data improves the picture of activity at sea. IFC-IOR (Gurugram, 2018) [3] works with 25 partner countries and 42 maritime security constructs [4].
• Underwater Domain Awareness: IPRD-2026 proposed a cooperative Indo-Pacific architecture to protect seaborne trade and undersea cables [1].
• Capacity for small states: IPMDA (Quad, 2022) gives partner agencies near-real-time data against illegal fishing and for disaster response [5].
• Climate resilience: shared oceanographic knowledge supports a coordinated response to climate risks [1].
• Human capital: an Indian Ocean academic network, links between coastal-city universities, and think-tank–government interfaces [1].
• Countering sea blindness: the monograph Sea Blindness and Maritime Heritage in India aims to raise public maritime awareness [1].

Gaps to bridge

• Implementation lag: white-shipping deals were approved with 26 countries and 3 groups, but few became operational [2].
• Trust and data sovereignty concerns about Quad-led systems; no public tracking of what each IPRD leads to.

Dialogues create trust, and scientific and academic cooperation turns that trust into capability. India should operationalise pending data-sharing agreements, train island states to use IPMDA data, and have NMF publish annual follow-ups on IPRD recommendations. This would advance the SAGAR/MAHASAGAR vision and SDG 14, and make India a credible net security provider in a resilient Indo-Pacific.