Abstract
Blue economy initiatives have emerged along marine and coastal areas, seeking to bring the green economy into a ‘blue world’. Often defined as a global policy agenda, blue economy discourses and practices aim to generate ‘blue growth’ by linking poverty reduction, social equality, and marine conservation. While global and national policies have spent decades addressing coastal resource management, broader blue economy discourses and practices seem, on the surface, to promote economic growth strategies for marine conservation. Increasingly, new market-oriented programs and projects aim to tap the financial value of the ocean’s ‘blue capital’, ostensibly fostering income generation and sustainable solutions for conservation finance. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and key-informant interviews across scales, we examine the meanings and practices of the blue economy in Southeast Asia and in the Philippines. As an archipelagic nation, millions of coastal dwellers in the Philippines depend on oceans as a major source of livelihood, food security, and well-being. We examine how multilateral institutions, bilateral organisations, state agencies, civil society organisations, and other key actors represent and enact the blue economy discursively and in practice. We find that oceans are being imagined as an open frontier that must be managed and utilised for both conservation and economic purposes. New territorialisation processes are creating new borders and management structures that often bypass social and environmental safeguards, posing a major threat to coastal dwellers. We conclude that by foregrounding economic development and coastal management, more socially just and environmentally sustainable governance approaches are neglected.
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Notes
We use the term civil society organisation to encompass non-governmental organisations, people’s organisations, and other non-state entities outside of the state and private sector.
APEC’s Ocean and Fisheries Working Group is a regional economic forum for the discussion of ocean management and maritime security through task and working groups. It has facilitated policy reforms and regional programmes to accelerate regional economic integration.
See Sullivan (2013) for further discussion on EKO’s nature finance on terrestrial ecosystems.
The Bloomberg Family Foundation was created by Michael Bloomberg, the 11th richest person in the world (see Forbes Rank 2018).
These projects include the Marine Conservation and Development Program (1984–1986) funded by USAID; the Fisheries Sector Program (1991–1997) funded by an Asian Development Bank loan; PEMSEA (1994–present) funded by the Global Environment Facility; The Coastal Resource Management Project (1996–2004); and the Fisheries Improved for Sustainable Harvests Project (2004–2010) funded by USAID (White et al. 2005).
Over US $230 million were invested in coastal resource management between 1974 and 2000 (36% government appropriations and loan counterparts, 63% international donors, and 1% local donors) (White et al. 2005, 272).
PEMSEA defined Integrated Coastal Management or ICM as ‘A dynamic, multidisciplinary and iterative process to promote sustainable development and management of coastal areas. It covers a full cycle of information collection, planning, decision making, management and monitoring of implementation’. (PEMSEA 2015, 7).
Executive Order No. 533 was issued in 2006 and signed by former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to mandate that Integrated Coastal Management be adopted as a national strategy to ensure the sustainable development of the country’s coastal and marine environment.
For example, the Comprehensive Assessment and Conservation of Blue Carbon Ecosystems and their Services in the Coral Triangle, BlueCARES and its Philippines counterpart project Integrated Assessment and Modelling of Blue Carbon Ecosystem for Conservation and Adaptive Management, IAMBlueCECAM.
Another example is the Slow Fish movement, which has started to oppose the blue growth rhetoric, fostering awareness about the importance of fishers as custodians of oceans and resisting the privatisation and enclosure of oceans, as our shared commons (e.g. Slow Fish ‘The sea: A common good’ (2019)).
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Acknowledgements
We dedicate this paper to the ocean defenders of the Philippines. We thank Ched Limsa, Jessie Varquez, Jr., and interview participants for their time, insights, and assistance. We are also grateful to the Editor and two anonymous reviewers whose constructive feedback led to substantial improvement of the manuscript. We thank Chandra Jayasuriya for creating the map.
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This research was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP180100965).
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Satizábal, P., Dressler, W.H., Fabinyi, M. et al. Blue economy discourses and practices: reconfiguring ocean spaces in the Philippines. Maritime Studies 19, 207–221 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-020-00168-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40152-020-00168-0