Blue Economy Struggles—Capital and Power in the Global Ocean: Introduction

Abstract

If we heed the calls of fisher movements, coastal communities and environmentalists worldwide a striking picture emerges: the ocean is being claimed, carved up and commodified at an unprecedented scale. This symposium, comprising four contributions and an introductory essay, debates this ongoing capitalist capture of the oceans in the Blue Economy era, tracing historical legacies, legal architectures, geopolitical motives and underlying class dynamics that animate the broader phenomenon of ocean grabbing. While the ‘blue hype’ of the past decade has framed ocean grabbing as a novel phenomenon, the introduction sets the stage by challenging such anachronisms, situating contemporary enclosures within a long history of maritime territorialisation and resource appropriation. Drawing on agrarian political economy, it foregrounds how the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has not only enabled but institutionalised ocean grabs, folding vast marine spaces into global circuits of capital accumulation. The four contributions that follow unpack these and related dynamics across different geographies and themes, including distant-water fishing, militarised law enforcement and the entwinement of conservation and extraction. They reveal how capitalist expansion at sea advances not only through brute dispossession. More often it occurs via subtle legal innovation, ecological narratives, piecemeal technocratic reconfigurations of territorial control and class differentiation across geographical scales. By re-examining the evolution and distinctiveness of oceanic relations of property and production, the symposium offers fresh insight into the shifting balances of capital and power in the governance of the global ocean and arising opportunities for resistance.