Carlo Ceglia

For at least the last ten years, the Republic of Seychelles has been lauded as a Blue Economy (BE) innovator, where ‘novel’ financial instruments have integrated the priorities of an international environmental non-governmental organisation into a comprehensive marine spatial planning programme. Drawing on 12 months ethnographic fieldwork in Seychelles, this chapter makes a distinction between the BE as a discursive event and as an operationalised development agenda – a distinction that effectively unbounds the BE from earlier conceptualisations of it as a boundary object. The account presented here argues for more closely attending to the BE’s multiple, contested, and strategic implementation processes. Ultimately, this chapter contends that the BE registers as a coherent development paradigm primarily in its reification as a policy package rather than as a fully embraced agenda that permeates individual actions (by policymakers or other stakeholders). As such, instead of dismissing it as either a nefarious scheme or an empty rhetorical trope, we argue that the BE exists less as a thing in the world (i.e. a coherent and potentially realisable, series of policy initiatives) than as an orientation that is used by multiple actors to make sense of the world.

This paper offers a rapid systematic map of existing qualitative literature on the relationship(s) between marine environments and youth in a changing climate. Building upon recent public, scientific, and scholarly trends that draw attention to the value the ocean holds for both socio‐economic prosperity and climate regulation, this systematic map asks: What evidence emerges from qualitative studies of youth engagement with marine environments in a changing climate? The mapping identified 20 articles thematically coded under three categories—namely, (i) youth experiences of marine environments and climate change, (ii) marine‐based pedagogical approaches to climate change, and (iii) creative strategies and new media. Along with these 3 main categories, the mapping identified different cross‐cutting themes that the 20 studies share. These were discussed as (a) the importance of intergenerational dynamics and intergenerational justice, (b) the lack of youth's insights in marine‐based climate discourses, and (c) the need for place‐based socio‐cultural and economic interventions. After presenting and discussing the results, this rapid systematic map concludes by indicating areas for further research. Specifically, it highlights the need for more place‐based, granular approaches that engage young people on their own terms and experiences as having tremendous value for articulating more ocean‐ and climate‐sensitive interventions. At the same time, it cautions that those same interventions must feed into wider socio‐economic and institutional dynamics that account for the historical responsibilities of a changing climate.

This paper takes up recent calls to work ‘for and against climate capitalism’ to foreground the possibility of strategic engagements within capitalist structures that could destabilise its long‐standing exploitative dynamics. In doing so, it locates prefigurative positions of an ocean counter‐politics generated through novel blue financial instruments; positions that are, perhaps, able to orient us towards different political paradigms beyond prescribed modes of capitalist development. Based on extended ethnography in the Republic of Seychelles—an archipelagic country that has pioneered two ‘world‐first’ climate finance deals in the last decade—I track how the operationalisations of these instruments have allowed for the formation of political spaces and subjectivities with, for, or against the country's ocean territory. Ultimately, I suggest we must hold the tension between climate capitalism expanding into a last oceanic frontier and the alternate futures that are simultaneously animating the current climate finance conjuncture.

This paper tracks the recent performative (re)scaling that state officials in the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelagic state in the Western Indian Ocean, have been articulating with the early adoption of a novel ocean‐focused development paradigm—namely, the Blue Economy. In doing so, it articulates the diverse practices these actors have mobilised to enact environmental governance so that Seychelles could turn from being a ‘small island state’ to a ‘big ocean state’—practices that offer a glimpse into the geopolitical improvisations of environmental state making at the margins. Based on 12‐month fieldwork in the country, the paper empirically maps how Seychellois state officials have repurposed some of the definitional features that debt restructuring‐based Blue Economy projects now exhibit globally—exemplified by moving from Marine Protected Areas to a Marine Spatial Plan, the definition of a 30% protection target in deep waters, or the scripting of their own oceanic vocabulary—to shift the narrative from being a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) towards a Big Ocean State (BOS[S]). Ultimately, the improvised (ocean) state emerging from this account serves to historically situate the comings‐together of an expanding debt‐fuelled Blue Economy, while articulating novel geopolitical terrains where power asymmetries are jostled, subjectivities and spaces are performatively brought into being, and environmental state‐making is tentatively (re)produced.

Joining others who call attention to the ways in which the ocean, its spaces, and its resources are being commodified, enclosed, and extracted in ways that benefit some at the expense of others, this paper offers a synthesis and review, echoing and extending the cautions being posited around ocean privatisation discourses and their tendencies toward simplistic conceptualisations and presentist thinking that all too often limit critical analysis. Therefore, this paper synthesises and analyses existing literature on the institutions and processes through which the ‘privatisation’ of the ocean has been, and is being, implemented, leading to two important points. First, it is showed how privatisation processes are often more complex than the word suggests. Privatisation is anything but ‘private’. The enclosure, appropriation, and rationalisation of space, resources, knowledge, and governance in the marine domain are occurring in institutional matrices where private actors operate in an array of relationships with the state (in its many, multiple guises), as well as non-governmental, and inter-governmental actors. Secondly, when viewing privatisation with a sensitivity to the array of institutions and actors involved, it is vital to recognise that what passes for a more recent capitalist tendency in the ocean realm rather continues long-standing, historical trajectories of violent extraction (which are equally complex in configuration). Expanding on these critiques, this paper turns to longstanding traditions that offer ways of thinking beyond privatisation and that engage the ocean not as a space of enclosure and extraction but as a space of relationality and livelihoods.