Moritz Albrecht

Over the past 20 years, the seaweed sector has grown to become a key pillar of blue economic endeavours. It is currently undergoing global expansion and renewal processes that initiate a variety of (de/re)territorialization forces partaking in the assembling of new translocal seaweed moments. Politically contextualized towards sustainable and inclusive trajectories, critical ocean studies have voiced deficiencies concerning the blue economy’s performance in relation to coastal communities and blue justice. Seaweed economies in Southeast Asia have provided improved livelihoods for coastal communities yet focus on selected regions and are tied to socio-technological means such as seaweed farming for global hydrocolloid markets, leaving other localities, approaches and communities at the margins of development. This chapter employs a conceptual framework of critical seaweed geographies at the intersection of assemblage thinking and blue justice considerations for studying three Indonesian small-scale seaweed harvesting groups at the margins of blue economic development. It analyzes the more-than-seaweed materialities, the complex littoral entanglements and the socio-economic frictions involved in the assembling of this alternative seaweed moment(s), and portrays the unfolding of power asymmetries, more-than-human relations, justice potentials and pitfalls as well as a conceptual discussion on relational seaweed/blueish geographies.

With transnational efforts such as the United Nations-fostered Decade of Ocean Science, aqueous spaces – of ocean, rivers, and all between – seem to appear ever more clearly as key enablers of wider ecological and societal transformation. At the same time, prominent calls for the exploitation of ‘untapped’ so-called blue resources and their political narrativising as pathways to sustainable transition under a blue growth umbrella create ecological and societal challenges. The introduction of this edited book sets the scene for the collection. It interweaves Blue-Thinking and Critical Ocean Geographies literature and develops a revised blueish approach to ask: How can engagements with blue spaces help us to develop other entanglements, other politics, and other plannings for a more ‘just’ transition? How can thinking with the wet world develop multiple imaginaries, fluid becomings, and other ways of thinking societal transformations and henceforth spark alternative futures off the beaten track? The diverse contributions of this book dip into these conceptual waters by providing a deeper understanding of the perceived roles, the complex processes, and the spatially ingrained capacities of what we call hereafter blueish entanglements and transformations. Through a multiperspectival approach, the polyphonic chapters explore these ‘blueish’ geographies through spaces, politics, and narratives and by taking into account planning, temporalities, and more-than-human relationships of (un-)just and (un)sustainable entanglements and transformations.

This book explores blueish geographies: new ways of thinking with ‘wet’ space through a porous and open conceptualisation. Through critical ocean thinking, more-than-wet ontologies, blue humanities, blue economy and planning, the diverse chapters think of the blueish as an extension, relation, and representation of water, extending the field, and questioning its absences. The book offers an original and interdisciplinary contribution to critical ocean and marine studies by expanding the ‘disciplines’ vocabularies, debates, possibilities, epistemologies, and methodologies. By bringing together diverse critical perspectives on wet spaces, politics, and their excesses, this book provides new conceptual and methodological tools for understanding temporalities and counter-archives, more-than-human ecologies and possible future plannings. Combining established and early-career scholars from different disciplines and regions, the volume advances current debates in critical geography and ocean studies while remaining accessible for teaching and other applied purposes. Blueish Entanglements and Transformations is intended for scholars, researchers and students in the field of critical ocean geographies, more-than-human geographies, maritime studies, hydrosocial studies, blue humanities, blue economy, political ecology, and related water-focused disciplines. It should also appeal to non-research readers working on water-related policies, development, and planning.

The EU bioeconomy policy is undergoing a rhetorical rescaling towards regenerative, spatially attentive and inclusive development trajectories. Partially understood as a maturation process in response to previous criticism of its weak sustainability credentials, lack of social integration and spatially insensitive trajectories, the chapter provides a contrasting analysis of this shift with the (policy) narratives and spatial imaginaries that delineate the future socio-spatial development trajectories in four novel regenerative sectors. By framing and analysing the sectors’ expressive formulations on development within the translocal assemblage of EU bioeconomy policy, the chapter highlights a problematic ‘disaligned alignment’ with this rhetorical rescaling and points to a continuous marginalisation of locally focused and spatially inclusive capacities in novel, regenerative bioeconomy sector development.

Sustainability transitions are employed as a key conceptual term in science, politics and societal debate. While often employed as an umbrella term for policy programmes aiming for a more environmentally and socially conscious shift of societal conduct, the understanding of its variegated processes has sparked an array of epistemological frameworks and approaches. Much research is criticised for an insensitivity to the socio-spatial complexities and multi-scalar relations of becoming, and the domination of large-scale, centralised and urban-oriented socio-economic development pathways calls for a rescaling of sustainability transitions with small-scale, localised and rural approaches. The rescaling of sustainability transitions in this sense plays out in multiple forms and rather than confining research to a streamlined conceptual frame, we see value in drawing on partially aligned, yet diverse accounts. Through engagement with different shades of rescaling, this book aims at a deeper, more diverse understanding of how sustainability transitions manifest in different spatial contexts, are framed by multi-scalar and continuously shifting socio-spatial relations and the role of (contested) spatial imaginaries on the capacities for ‘rescaled’ future trajectories.

Algae-based biomass occupies a prominent role in policy narratives for a more sustainable future situated between Blue Growth Strategies and European (Blue) bioeconomy development. Especially in Norway, the developing seaweed farming sector is portrayed as a novel bioresource sector entailing an array of benefits to remediate global as local environmental and socio-economic challenges. Accredited with massive growth potentials and framed by large-scale industrialist rhetoric with a future in conquering ocean spaces through technological fixes, the sector’s development faces multiple challenges. Additionally, the assumptive growth-centred policy narratives employed leave little room for small-scale, locally embedded alternatives called upon by many experts on sustainable and socially just blue resource governance. The paper addresses this issue by conceptualizing Norwegian seaweed farming as an assembling process with a focus on (policy) narratives as a means for governmental spatial interventions. Based on qualitative data with a focus on active Norwegian seaweed farmers’ perspectives for the sector’s current practices and future developments, the paper assesses the relations and contradictions between the optimistic key policy narratives, current sector developments, and the entrepreneur positionalities that shape the reproduction processes of this Norwegian seaweed assemblage. The paper shows that strong beliefs in extensive growth and technological solutions to tackle the fluid materialities of seaweed production are widespread among entrepreneurs. Paired with policy strategies and a development environment rooted in similar narratives, this creates a current development approach that reduces challenges to technological and administrative domains and neglects the (local) socio-economic and sustainability potential vested in alternative, small-scale approaches.

Many Finnish small towns have developed revitalization plans for town centres to counter the problems of decline, rebrand the town, and compete for residents and businesses. Accompanied by municipal branding efforts, infrastructure projects provide small towns with an improved appearance. These projects are often designed by national planning firms and consultants and materialised by private investors, yet it remains unclear if the changes suit the needs and socio-spatial peculiarities of the places they are intended for. This article sheds light onto downtown revitalization efforts by case studies in six shrinking Finnish small towns which have moved beyond the draft planning phase in their downtown revitalisation projects. The research is based on a mixed-methods approach, and pairs assemblage conceptualization with the concepts of small town planning and place-making. The relational approach enables us to show the challenges for shrinking small towns to materialise well-intentioned revitalization plans and place-based solutions in a complex place assemblage with conflicting pressure from big commercial actors, consultants, reluctant investors, limited local economies and demographics in decline.

Depopulation and shrinkage are a common socio-spatial phenomenon in many Northern localities and are frequently accompanied by a stigmatization of the affected localities and their populations. This editorial introduces the special issue on depopulation and shrinkage in a Northern context that takes its point of departure from the Nordic Geographers Meeting 2022 on multiple geographies and its keynote lecture by Josefina Syssner on the question: What can geographers do for shrinking geographies? The special issue displays a range of contributions from Northern context that discuss and evaluate the heterogenous processes of shrinking localities from multiple perspectives within and beyond geography. Through broad, yet empirically detailed and multiscalar focused assessments it stresses that shrinkage as a phenomenon is a fundamental character of Nordic and other societies, which requires a rethinking and should be acknowledged as a ‘natural’ development trajectory in planning and development.

Regional bioeconomies promote sustainable, regional economies under the auspices of EU green growth policies. Combining prospects of rural rejuvenation, sustainability and innovation, they are employed to address climate change, societal challenges, and often benefit from substantial public funds. Yet, despite public finance's key role for bio-based transitions and (regional) bioeconomies, it has received little academic attention. Framed by conceptualisations on greening finance and (sustainable) policy narratives, this paper evaluates the public finance processes of three spatially variegated regional bioeconomy developments in Europe (Finland, Sweden, Spain). It provides empirical accounts from the case study sites and contrasts their public finance narratives with sustainable bioeconomy policy trajectories employed in EU policy promotion and benchmarking. This critical questioning of the current representations of regional bioeconomies in public finance narratives portrays a problematic mismatch between the dominant selective economic features and wider EU policy aims, particularly in relation to sustainability. Accompanied by the neglect of decisive local features in these benchmarking narratives, they promote a sustainably and spatially unreflective path forward for bioeconomy policy learning and development.