The “blue economy” emerged as a popular vision for sustainable ocean development during the 2010s, as communities across the world grappled with challenges of declining ocean health, economic crises and stalling development outcomes. Today, it is a centerpiece of many global sustainable ocean agendas, including those of the World Bank, U.N. Environment Programme and Asian Development Bank.

Central the blue economy’s appeal is a promise to transform human interactions with the ocean, promoting a “paradigm shift,” to quote The Commonwealth, from “brown” development models to one that prioritizes ecological health, improved livelihoods and job creation in balance with economic prosperity.

In the current age of ecological crisis, accelerating climate change impacts and deepening inequities, such change in how society engages with oceans is urgently needed.

However, after years researching the blue economy — its actors, activities and logics — I’ve come to suspect there’s something fishy about this oceans vision. Is the blue economy but a charming deception that is being leveraged to extend and innovate exploitative systems ever further over maritime spaces, communities and ecologies?

A vision from SIDS?

It is commonly said within policy and academic circles that the blue economy originated under the leadership of small island developing states (SIDS) at the Rio+20 conference of 2012. According to this narrative, ocean-reliant communities across the world united to advocate for sustainable ocean development, by asserting their agency and challenging global power structures to demand action on priorities critical to them. While there is some truth to this account — as SIDS did play a critical role in popularizing the blue economy at Rio+20 and leveraged this concept to bring awareness to the unique development contexts of island communities — the partiality of this narrative is misleading.

Careful reading of the blue economy’s history reveals how this vision was instead proposed by the U.S. government and European Commission as a tool for economic recovery. Searching for avenues to drive economic growth in the wake of the global financial crisis in 2008 and Eurozone crisis from 2009, these powers saw the ocean as an “untapped” resource that could be harnessed for “new business opportunities.”

Attention was afforded to issues of ocean degradation and climate change, but the primary areas of interest were new and emerging sectors of ocean innovation and industry. In Europe’s case, these were related to renewable energy, biotechnology, mineral resources, coastal and marine tourism, and aquaculture.

During these early years, the idea that the blue economy would provide particular benefit to SIDS — and proactively seek to address their unique challenges, ambitions and contexts — was absent. Rather, this was a blue economy that was inward facing: a nation-building project for the U.S. and region-stabilizing one for the EU.

Therefore, at its inception the blue economy was not designed as a transformative alternative to business as usual. It was a tool for getting the some of the world’s most powerful economies back on track following economic collapse, and for encouraging the expansion of industrial activities oceanward.

Key blue economy actors

As the blue economy has gathered momentum over the 15 years since, a broad group of actors has come to engage the term and craft ocean development programs in its name. In the Pacific islands region where my research focuses, blue economy programs have largely been spearheaded and funded by external bodies: intergovernmental organizations (e.g. the World Bank, United Nations, European Union), multilateral funds (the Global Environment Facility) and, increasingly, philanthropies (Waitt Institute and Bezos Earth Fund).

As a result, these programs often come with ready-made frameworks designed to align with the objectives and priorities of development partners, including partners’ specific understandings of sustainable ocean development as envisioned under the blue economy.

The “Blue Prosperity Coalition” led by U.S. philanthropic bodies in the region, for example, descends from a particular blue economy understanding advocated by the Waitt Institute.  Premised on the advancement of 30% marine protected area (MPA) coverage by 2030 (30×30), these initiatives sit somewhat awkwardly in Pacific contexts, where permanent no-take zones are rare and the gazetting of marine areas for purposes of MPA designation, governance and accounting is fraught due to reasons including flexible and contested customary tenure claims, weak state jurisdiction in regional areas, and, in nations such as Fiji, the requirement that customary rights holders waive their tenure claims under gazetting processes.

This is not to say that area-based marine management initiatives are altogether ineffective in the Pacific. Indeed, the positive contribution (conservation and economic) of Pacific-designed and -led initiatives emphasizes the potential value of area-based measures (e.g. Parties to the Nauru Agreement’s Vessel Day Scheme or community-based fisheries management practices that operate in, and align with, community marine managed areas).

What this concentration of external forces acting as drivers of the Pacific blue economy does suggest, however, is the need to interrogate whose understanding of sustainable ocean development is prioritized in blue economy programs, and subsequently what initiatives are pursued. After all, what is transformational about a cookie-cutter ocean development agenda set and funded by powerful global institutions?

The blue economy and justice

For a vision promising sustainable ocean development, the blue economy has consistently fallen short in its commitments to the equity and justice components of this equation. This has been particularly apparent in coastal communities, where fishers and marine rights holders are encountering the blue economy as a threat.

In the context of the Indian Ocean, the Independent Peoples’ Tribunal found the blue economy to be an “illicit grab on ocean and coastal commons” that dispossesses coastal communities of their rights to marine areas, excludes them from coastal regions, and compromises their sociocultural connections to ocean spaces.

This sentiment was reaffirmed in the Call to Action from small-scale fishers, which, in drawing on a global network of fisher organizations, called on governments to protect small-scale fishers from the impact of well-resourced blue economy sectors, or risk jeopardizing the future of coastal communities.

My conversations with representatives of the Locally-Managed Marine Area Network in the Pacific raised further concerns of knowledge production, suggesting the blue economy acted to undermine local practices and ocean management wisdom in favor of external “expertise.” Consistent across these groups is a vigilance upon the harmful underbelly of the blue economy, highlighting how it is coastal communities, peoples and ecosystems that bear the brunt of large-scale ocean industrialization and conservation activities conducted in its name.

Frameworks beyond blue

With a charming promise to transform how societies engage with the ocean and harness its benefits, it is not surprising the blue economy has attracted global interest, particularly among coastal and island nations.

My research and others’ draw attention to the foul odor rising from the blue economy’s undelivered promises, ungenuine commitments to change, and continued pursuit of economic rationalization. It warns that this sustainable ocean vision may be operating as a tool for pacifying demands for sustainable and equitable ocean relations, rather than one that advances them.

This challenges us to look outside the blue economy for frameworks that genuinely encourage us to think otherwise about ocean relations, to frameworks that prioritize principles of self-determination and ecological justice.

Failure to do so will only see us perpetuate old habits of ocean exploitation and harm, which we as a global community can no longer tolerate.

Philippa Louey is a research fellow at the Pacific Security College in Australia and earned a Ph.D. from the Australian National University, where she studied the politics of the blue economy in the Pacific islands region.

Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs) regulate commercially valuable fish species across the world’s oceans, but their own activities often go unregulated, listen here:

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Citations:

Lee, K., Noh, J., & Khim, J. S. (2020). The blue economy and the United Nations’ sustainable development goals: Challenges and opportunities. Environment International, 137, 105528. doi:10.1016/j.envint.2020.105528

Louey, P. (2025). A transformative blue economy? Discourse, hegemony and passive revolution in the Pacific (Doctoral dissertation, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia). doi:10.25911/T544-X440

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