Practising the Blue Economy in a Big Ocean State: The Republic of Seychelles, the Ocean, and the Financing of Climate Futures

Abstract

Loosely identified with the catch-all term of ‘Blue Economy’ (BE) and funded through ‘innovative’ financial instruments, in the past decade the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelagic state in the Western Indian Ocean, has pioneered novel interventions in its ocean space at the intersection of sustainability discourses, environmental protection, and social development to map out modes of existing as an ocean territory on a warming planet. Empirically drawing from these interventions, the present work examines the applied political as well as analytical (re)orientations that such recent fascinations with the ocean are able to generate – for both local practitioners and scholarly debates. Theoretically, this thesis builds upon, and extends, a) geographical scholarship within critical ocean studies, b) contemporary policy and academic literature on the Blue Economy, and c) emergent work on climate finance as (one of) the basis to (un)make future trajectories. Methodologically, it stems from one of the first sustained long-term ethnographic involvements with the development and operationalisation of a national Blue Economy agenda (twelve months in Seychelles). In linking these threads together, this thesis advances an approach that I term ‘oceanic thinking’ as an applied political ontology that (re)centres the subject(s) thinking with and from the oceanic environment as an act of political mobilisation. With that, it argues for the value that ‘oceanic thinking’ holds for contemporary climate finance interventions in the marine governance realm – especially for prefiguring (perhaps progressive) political spaces where collective subjectivities and agencies are formed for those actors usually at the receiving end of development practices, but at the forefront of climate change.
Specifically, the thesis first extends work in critical ocean studies and allied disciplines by testing out the applied political possibilities that the ‘oceanic thinking’ approach holds. Second, it complements Blue Economy scholarship with a much-needed ethnographic account of an unfolding BE programme in place and time. Third, it unpacks the scalar politics of the BE demonstrating its reality more as a policy reification at a state level rather than a fully-fledged, and fully embraced, development agenda on the ground – while articulating the state’s efforts to move beyond the Blue Economy towards a form of ‘oceanic thinking’. Fourth, it contributes with a reading of the political openings that contemporary blue climate finance instruments allow, specifically for local communities. Finally, it advances a ‘more elemental’ and ‘more historical’ reading of the Blue Economy in Seychelles – that is, a reading that carefully attends to the affective and material potentialities the ocean has always had to either reinforce or disrupt political configurations.