Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth

Introduction

The Blue Economy has become a dominant policy frame for ocean governance across international institutions, national governments, and development agencies. Promoted as a pathway to reconcile economic development with marine conservation, the Blue Economy bundles a wide array of activities — fisheries modernisation, aquaculture expansion, marine biotechnology, offshore renewable energy, blue carbon markets, and ecosystem service valuation — under a single rubric that promises “sustainable” growth of ocean-based sectors (World Bank & UN DESA, 2017; OECD, 2016; Bennett et al., 2019; Sumaila et al., 2021). Its rhetorical power rests on a set of interconnected theoretical commitments: that the ocean can be productively valued and managed through techno-managerial interventions; that market instruments and private finance can be harnessed to deliver conservation and development simultaneously; and crucially, that economic expansion can be decoupled from environmental degradation through efficiency gains and technological innovation. These commitments mirror the broader Green Growth paradigm that has dominated environmental policy debates in recent decades (Jackson, 2009; Parrique et al., 2019).

Degrowth scholarship offers a sustained and radical critique of these commitments. Rather than treating growth as a neutral policy variable, degrowth insists that perpetual GDP expansion in high-consumption societies is incompatible with planetary limits and that policies premised on absolute decoupling are empirically and theoretically precarious (Latouche, 2009; Kallis, 2018; Hickel, 2020). Political ecology complements this critique by illuminating the mechanisms — enclosure, accumulation by dispossession, spatial fixes, and ecologically unequal exchange — through which ostensibly sustainable reforms can reproduce dispossession and inequality (Harvey, 2003; Martínez-Alier, 2002; Peluso & Lund, 2011). When combined, degrowth and political ecology provide a powerful analytic lens for interrogating the Blue Economy’s foundational assumptions and policy agenda.

This article asks: How does a degrowth political ecology reframe and dismantle the theoretical corpus of the Blue Economy, and what alternative normative and policy framework emerges when ocean governance is reconceived through degrowth principles? The inquiry is explicitly theory-first and literature-based. It centres degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and uses political ecology to trace causal mechanisms by which Blue Economy policies can produce enclosure, intensification, and unequal exchange. The analysis is oriented to the Global South: it foregrounds anti-colonial delinking — the strategic capacity of Global South states and communities to refuse extractive projects and build selective economic autonomy from growth-dependent value chains — local sovereignty, and redistribution as central concerns for any just ocean governance. Empirical material is used sparingly and only to illustrate theoretical claims; the article does not present new field data.

The literature review synthesises degrowth and political ecology literatures relevant to ocean governance and sets out the research gap it addresses. From there, the methodology section explains the literature selection and analytic approach. The results section presents the synthesised findings — organised as thematic critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemology, economic assumptions, governance instruments, spatial fixes, distributional effects, and techno-optimism. The discussion interprets these findings, links them to the identified gap, and develops a normative alternative, Blue Degrowth, with concrete policy modalities and reflections on political feasibility. The conclusion draws together the contribution and sets out a research agenda.

Literature review and theoretical foundations

To mount a systematic critique of the Blue Economy, it is necessary to bring degrowth’s normative commitments into sustained conversation with political ecology’s mechanisms of power and enclosure. This section synthesises the core tenets of degrowth, the critical insights of political ecology, and the ways these literatures jointly problematise the Blue Economy’s foundational assumptions.

Degrowth is not a single doctrine but a family of interrelated arguments and political projects that converge on a few core claims. First, degrowth rejects GDP growth as the primary policy goal in high-consumption societies: it argues that continued expansion of material throughput is incompatible with ecological limits and that policy should instead prioritise sufficiency, redistribution, and well-being (Latouche, 2009; Kallis, 2018). Second, degrowth insists that technological efficiency alone cannot deliver the scale of environmental improvement required; efficiency gains are often offset by rebound effects and by the structural dynamics of capitalist accumulation that channel savings into further consumption (Hickel, 2020). Third, degrowth emphasises democratic, convivial forms of social provisioning — local autonomy, cooperative ownership, and commons governance — over marketisation and financialisation. Finally, degrowth foregrounds questions of justice: who benefits from resource use, who bears ecological burdens, and how historical patterns of colonial extraction shape contemporary inequalities (Demaria et al., 2013; D’Alisa & Kallis, 2020).

The critique of decoupling is central to degrowth. Decoupling refers to the separation of economic growth (usually measured by GDP) from environmental pressures (resource use, emissions, biodiversity loss). Degrowth scholars distinguish between relative decoupling (reduced intensity per unit of GDP) and absolute decoupling (total environmental pressures decline while GDP grows). The literature surveyed by Parrique et al. (2019) and others shows that relative decoupling is common in specific contexts and for particular indicators, but absolute decoupling at the global scale and at the speed required to meet planetary boundaries is not empirically evident and is theoretically constrained by thermodynamic and material realities (Parrique et al., 2019; Hickel, 2020). Mechanisms that undermine decoupling include rebound effects (where efficiency gains lower costs and stimulate more consumption), problem-shifting (where solutions to one problem create others), the limited substitutability of materials, and cost-shifting through trade that externalises environmental burdens to lower-consumption regions (Parrique et al., 2019; Hickel et al., 2021, 2022; Hornborg, 2011). Degrowth therefore argues that efficiency must be complemented by sufficiency — that is, deliberate downscaling of production and consumption in wealthy regions — and by redistributive policies that reduce inequality and ecological footprints (O’Neill et al., 2018).

Political ecology contributes a complementary set of insights. Where degrowth supplies normative ends and macroeconomic critique, political ecology supplies mechanisms and analysis across scales that explain how policies are translated into material outcomes. Political ecology examines how power, property regimes, and institutional arrangements shape resource access and environmental change. Concepts such as accumulation by dispossession and spatial fix (Harvey, 2003) — the latter referring to how capital resolves crises of overaccumulation by opening new geographical frontiers for investment and extraction — explain how capital seeks new arenas when terrestrial frontiers close or yields diminish. Green grabbing literature (Fairhead et al., 2012) shows how conservation and sustainability narratives can legitimise appropriation of commons through legal reforms, concessions, and market instruments. Ecologically unequal exchange theory highlights how trade and value chains can transfer ecological burdens from wealthy to poorer regions, enabling high consumption in the North whilst exporting environmental damage to the South (Martínez-Alier, 2002; Gereffi, 1994).

The two frameworks are more than compatible: together, they reorient the central question of ocean governance from efficiency and growth to justice and limits. Degrowth asks whether the Blue Economy’s growth-compatible assumptions are normatively and biophysically defensible; political ecology asks how the instruments and institutional arrangements of the Blue Economy produce particular distributive outcomes. This reframing has immediate implications: it challenges the epistemic authority of techno-managerial templates — the assumption that market-compatible technical and administrative solutions can be universally scaled across diverse ocean governance contexts regardless of local conditions — problematises market instruments as primary governance tools, and insists on place-based, commons-oriented alternatives that centre local sovereignty and anti-colonial delinking.

The critical Blue Economy literature provides empirical and conceptual support for these concerns. Scholars have documented how Blue Economy narratives often universalise policy templates, prioritise market solutions (public-private partnerships, payments for ecosystem services, blue bonds), and underplay power asymmetries and distributional consequences (Bennett et al., 2019, 2021; Blythe et al., 2021; Silver et al., 2015; Voyer et al., 2018; Midlen, 2021). Economic framings that foreground GDP and market valuation are critiqued for obscuring non-market values and enabling rent capture by powerful actors (Sumaila et al., 2021). Voyer et al. (2018) identify four competing interpretations of the Blue Economy — ranging from growth-centric to conservation-led to social justice-oriented — and demonstrate that these interpretations carry fundamentally different implications for governance design, a mapping that reveals the Blue Economy’s internal incoherence and the power relations that shape which interpretations prevail. Midlen (2021, 2024) analyses the Blue Economy as a form of governmentality: a set of spatially embedded rationalities and practices that problematise the ocean as a resource space in need of management, foreclosing alternative ways of knowing and governing marine commons. These critiques dovetail with degrowth’s scepticism about decoupling and political ecology’s attention to enclosure and unequal exchange.

A growing strand of scholarship attempts to reform rather than reject the Blue Economy by advancing “just,” “inclusive,” or contextually sensitive variants of the paradigm. Bennett et al. (2021) identify ten specific risks of Blue Economy expansion — including exclusion of marginalised communities, blue grabbing, and labour exploitation — and propose corresponding safeguards within a broadly growth-compatible frame. Voyer et al. (2021) argue for greater contextual sensitivity in Blue Economy design, emphasising the importance of coherence between national policy instruments and the diverse governance arrangements of specific coastal settings. Whilst these reformist contributions identify genuine governance risks and offer practical remedies, they largely preserve the Blue Economy’s foundational commitment to sectoral growth as the organising logic of ocean governance. Blue Degrowth departs from this reformist tradition: its critique targets not only the distributional outcomes of Blue Economy governance but the growth premise itself. The question is not how to make Blue Economy expansion more equitable, but whether expansion premised on growth-compatible decoupling is the appropriate framework at all.

Yet, despite these convergences, a gap remains. Much of the critical Blue Economy literature identifies governance risks and distributional concerns, but fewer works place degrowth at the centre of the critique and systematically translate degrowth principles into a coherent policy programme for ocean governance. This article addresses that gap by synthesising degrowth and political ecology literatures and developing a “Blue Degrowth” framework that is both normative and operational — one that articulates principles, institutional modalities, and policy instruments suitable for Global South contexts whilst remaining attentive to political feasibility.

Methods

This article is a literature-based research article that employs purposive sampling and thematic synthesis to develop a theory-first critique. The methodology is designed to produce a coherent conceptual argument rather than to generate new empirical data.

The literature selection began with canonical degrowth texts (Latouche, 2009; Jackson, 2009; Kallis, 2018; Hickel, 2020) and foundational political ecology works (Martínez-Alier, 2002; Robbins, 2012; Harvey, 2003). From these, the review traced references to critical Blue Economy scholarship (Silver et al., 2015; Bennett et al., 2019, 2021; Blythe et al., 2021; Voyer & van Leeuwen, 2019; Voyer et al., 2018, 2021; Midlen, 2021, 2024, 2026a, 2026b) and to literatures on global value chains, green grabbing, and enclosure (Gereffi, 1994; Fairhead et al., 2012; Peluso, 1992; Peluso & Lund, 2011). Institutional mainstream documents — including the World Bank & UN DESA (2017) and OECD (2016) blue economy frameworks — are engaged explicitly as the primary policy expressions of the growth-compatible paradigm the article critiques, rather than as supplementary background literature. Inclusion criteria prioritised theoretical relevance to degrowth or political ecology, explicit engagement with growth, decoupling, or resource governance, and disciplinary diversity. Works that treated growth as agnostic or advanced growth-neutral policy frameworks without engaging with degrowth critiques were deprioritised to maintain theoretical coherence.

Analytically, the article uses thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping. Texts were coded for recurring themes: decoupling and its critiques; market instruments and commodification; enclosure and spatial fix; distributional effects and value capture; techno-optimism and problem-shifting; and governance alternatives. Causal mechanisms were identified by tracing how policy instruments (e.g., PPPs, PES, concessions) are theorised to produce outcomes (enclosure, intensification, unequal exchange). Normative implications were identified by aligning degrowth principles with governance alternatives and policy modalities. The method is interpretive and synthetic: it aims to produce a coherent theoretical critique and a policy programme grounded in the selected literature.

Throughout this article, claims derived from the reviewed literature are signalled by citation at the point of use. Normative propositions and policy elaborations — that is, the author’s own translation of degrowth principles into governance alternatives — are distinguished by phrasing such as “Blue Degrowth proposes,” “this article argues,” or “the framework advocates.” This distinction is made explicit to maintain analytical transparency, whilst recognising that the degrowth political ecology tradition is constitutively normative by design: the separation of analytical and normative content is a matter of prose clarity, not epistemological pretence.

Results

The literature synthesis yields six interrelated findings that together constitute a systematic critique of the Blue Economy from a degrowth political ecology perspective. These findings describe widely documented tendencies in Blue Economy governance, not universal outcomes that apply uniformly in every setting. The mechanisms identified represent observable patterns for which substantial empirical evidence exists; exceptions, partial implementations, and contested cases are acknowledged, and the article’s scope qualifications in the discussion section address these further.

These six findings are not discrete; they interlock and reinforce one another, producing a comprehensive challenge to growth-compatible ocean governance. Figure 1 below maps the causal chain from Blue Economy policy instruments through intermediate mechanisms to distributive outcomes, providing a schematic overview of the argument.

Figure 1. Causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes.

Source: Author’s own synthesis from the reviewed literature.

The Indonesian illustrative vignette

The following composite illustration draws on documented patterns from Indonesian coastal fisheries and aquaculture to show how the causal mechanisms identified above play out in practice. The vignette draws on ethnographic, policy, and political ecology studies of customary marine tenure, market integration, and value chain dynamics in Indonesian coastal communities (Halim et al., 2019, 2020; Adhuri et al., 2016; Thorburn, 2000, 2001; Mantjoro, 1996; Zerner, 1994; Bailey & Zerner, 1992), and is anonymised to avoid identifying any single location.

In a coastal district of Indonesia, small-scale fishers and seaweed producers historically managed nearshore areas through customary rules that regulated access, seasonal closures, and gear types (Adhuri et al., 2016; Thorburn, 2000, 2001; Bailey & Zerner, 1992; Zerner, 1994; Mantjoro, 1996). These customary institutions were embedded in social relations: elders mediated disputes, seasonal rituals governed harvest timing, and reciprocal labour arrangements distributed risk (Thorburn, 2000; Mantjoro, 1996). Local provisioning — food for households, barter exchanges, and small-scale sales at local markets — was the backbone of livelihoods (Bailey, 1988; Mantjoro, 1996). Ecological knowledge was place-based: fishers read currents, seasonal patterns, and local species behaviour to manage harvests adaptively (Thorburn, 2000, 2001; Bailey & Zerner, 1992; Zerner, 1994).

Over the past decade, a national Blue Economy strategy promoted aquaculture intensification and export-oriented processing (Bappenas, 2023; World Bank, 2021; Trenggono, 2025), effectively reframing these nearshore areas as zones of economic potential and a development pathway. Investment incentives, tax breaks, and public-private partnership models were offered to attract capital (World Bank, 2021; Bappenas, 2023). Certification schemes that favoured larger producers able to meet compliance costs (Vandergeest & Unno, 2012; Bush et al., 2013) were introduced to access premium markets, and a processing plant was financed in the regional capital to aggregate and process raw material for export (World Bank, 2021).

The transition unfolded unevenly. Some producers — those with capital or social connections — were able to scale up, adopt new gear, and meet certification requirements (Bush et al., 2013). Many small producers, however, faced barriers: the upfront costs of inputs and certification, the need to access processing facilities located in the regional centre, and the loss of customary access as nearshore areas were reclassified for commercial use (Bush et al., 2013; Vandergeest & Unno, 2012; Halim et al., 2019). This pattern exemplifies the accumulation by dispossession mechanism theorised by Harvey (2003), where legal reforms reconfigure property relations to favour capital accumulation. Market integration created new incentives: higher short-term prices encouraged intensification and monoculture practices that simplified habitats and increased vulnerability to pests and disease (Bush et al., 2013; World Bank, 2021). Inputs (seed stock, feed, and chemical treatments) were increasingly purchased from outside, creating new dependencies and cash outflows (MicroSave Consulting, 2025).

Initially, incomes rose for some households, and local employment in processing expanded (World Bank, 2021). But as production scaled, per-unit prices fell and competition increased (Purcell et al., 2017; Garlock et al., 2020; Dahl & Oglend, 2014), creating the Jevons paradox. Certification compliance costs and transport expenses eroded margins for small producers (Bush et al., 2013; Tsantiris et al., 2018). When a regional climate shock (anomalous sea temperatures and storm events) reduced yields, small producers faced price collapses and limited social protection (Iskandar et al., 2022; MicroSave Consulting, 2025). The processing firm, integrated into global value chains, shifted sourcing to other regions with lower costs while retaining capital and profits in the national centre (Purcell et al., 2017). This illustrates the buyer-driven value chain dynamics theorised by Gereffi (1994), where downstream actors capture surplus value whilst externalising risk to primary producers. As a result, local employment was precarious: casual labour, seasonal contracts, and limited labour protections meant that households had little buffer against shocks (Statista, 2024; MicroSave Consulting, 2025).

Institutional changes compounded these dynamics. Formal concessions and zoning regulations, designed to attract investment, often failed to recognise customary tenure (Halim et al., 2019, 2020; World Bank, 2021). Where co-management arrangements were nominally established, they lacked resources and enforcement capacity (Halim et al., 2020; Adhuri et al., 2016). Certification schemes, whilst marketed as inclusive, required documentation and investments that excluded many small producers (Vandergeest & Unno, 2012). Financial instruments (credit lines tied to production targets) encouraged expansion but also indebtedness (MicroSave Consulting, 2025). These institutional reconfigurations exemplify the enclosure mechanisms described in the political ecology literature (Peluso & Lund, 2011; Fairhead et al., 2012). The net effect was a reconfiguration of access and value: ecological burdens (habitat simplification, pollution, and increased vulnerability to climate variability) were concentrated locally, whilst value was captured by processors and exporters upstream (Purcell et al., 2017; Garlock et al., 2020).

This vignette illustrates several mechanisms identified in the theoretical analysis: market integration producing a production treadmill (a Jevons-like effect), value capture by downstream actors, and the externalisation of ecological and climate risks onto precarious producers. It also shows how legal and institutional changes (formalisation of concessions, certification regimes, and investment incentives) can reconfigure access and governance in ways that disadvantage customary users. The vignette is intentionally composite and anonymised; it is offered as an illustrative anchor for the causal pathways discussed above rather than as empirical proof.

Discussion

The degrowth political ecology critique shifts the terms of the Blue Economy debate in three related directions: from growth-compatibility towards limits and sufficiency; from technocratic optimisation towards justice — anti-colonial delinking, reparative redistribution, and commons governance; and from marketisation and financialisation towards plural, participatory governance. Each of these shifts has practical implications and involves trade-offs that cannot be wished away.

Putting sufficiency and limits at the centre of policy evaluation requires new metrics and political strategies. Metrics that combine ecological ceilings with social foundations can guide policy, but they also require political negotiation: who sets the ceilings, and how are social foundations defined and financed? Degrowth scholars emphasise redistribution: wealthy countries must reduce consumption and provide material and financial support to enable sustainable development in the Global South (Kallis, 2018; Hickel, 2020). This raises geopolitical questions about responsibility, reparations, and the redistribution of ecological space that cannot be resolved by technocratic fixes alone.

Anti-colonial delinking is politically fraught but, this article argues, a necessary principle for any framework that takes postcolonial justice seriously. Delinking does not mean isolation; it means strategic autonomy and the capacity to refuse extractive projects that reproduce dispossession. Practically, delinking can take the form of selective import substitution for critical inputs, legal protections for customary tenure, and trade policies that prioritise local value retention. These measures will face resistance from powerful economic interests and from international institutions that promote liberalised trade. Building political coalitions among social movements, local communities, progressive policymakers, and sympathetic international actors is essential. Historical precedents show that policy shifts are possible when social movements and political entrepreneurs align to create institutional openings (Demaria et al., 2013).

Commons governance and cooperative economic models offer practical alternatives to marketisation, but they require institutional support. Legal recognition of customary rights, access to finance, technical assistance, and supportive procurement policies are necessary to make commons governance viable. Public investment in local processing and infrastructure can reduce dependency on buyer-driven chains, but such investments require fiscal space and political commitment. Debt relief and international climate finance can help create that space, but they must be structured to avoid new conditionalities that undermine sovereignty.

Addressing trade-offs around livelihoods and food security is critical. Phased transitions, social protection measures (basic incomes, employment guarantees), and retraining programmes can mitigate social disruption. Pilot projects and place-based experiments can demonstrate viable pathways and build political support. Most importantly, transitions must be co-designed with affected communities to ensure legitimacy and effectiveness. The vignette above illustrates how top-down Blue Economy strategies can produce short-term gains but long-term vulnerabilities; Blue Degrowth insists that transitions be designed to enhance resilience and local provisioning rather than to maximise export earnings.

Political feasibility depends on strategy. Degrowth proposals are often dismissed as utopian or politically unrealistic. Yet history shows that major policy shifts — welfare states, land reforms, environmental regulations — have been achieved through coalition building, social movements, and institutional entrepreneurship. Blue Degrowth requires similar strategies: building alliances across labour, environmental, and community groups; leveraging legal avenues to secure rights; and using pilot successes to scale up reforms. International solidarity and normative pressure, through transnational networks and progressive institutions, can also create enabling conditions.

Finally, research and practice must be iterative. Comparative empirical studies can test the causal mechanisms identified here and refine policy modalities. Interdisciplinary collaborations, combining political ecology, ecological economics, law, and development studies, are essential to design context-sensitive Blue Degrowth interventions. Metrics and monitoring systems must be developed in partnership with communities to ensure they reflect local priorities and ecological realities.

Conclusion

This article has argued that the Blue Economy’s foundational commitments — absolute decoupling, techno-managerial universalism, and the primacy of market instruments — are not merely governance choices but theoretically precarious assumptions that, when traced through the mechanisms of political ecology, demonstrably reproduce dispossession, value extraction, and ecological burden transfer in Global South contexts. The six critiques developed here are not independent complaints about implementation failures; they form an interlocking structure in which the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing enables its market instruments, which in turn produce the spatial fixes and distributional outcomes the framework then legitimates as the costs of sustainable growth. Blue Degrowth names the departure from this structure: a framework grounded in limits, sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, and democratic deliberation that does not seek to reform the Blue Economy from within but to reorient ocean governance around a different set of foundational questions about value, access, and justice.

Several things remain genuinely open, and intellectual honesty requires naming them. The causal mechanisms identified here are drawn from the literature rather than tested comparatively — the Indonesian vignette illustrates but does not prove them, and the specific conditions under which each mechanism is most operative, or can most effectively be interrupted, will differ across governance contexts (Ostrom, 1990; Voyer et al., 2021). The five Blue Degrowth principles articulate what just ocean governance should pursue; translating them into viable institutional arrangements in settings where state capacity is limited, where international development finance conditions lending on growth targets, and where social movements face asymmetric political constraints is a further project that this article can only sketch (Demaria et al., 2013; Hickel, 2020). There is also an unresolved tension within the framework: anti-colonial delinking requires the strategic autonomy of Global South states and communities, yet commons governance and democratic deliberation require institutional conditions — legal pluralism, enforcement capacity, participatory planning infrastructure — that many of those states currently lack. Building those conditions is itself a political project, not a technical one, and Blue Degrowth has more to say about what it requires normatively than about how to get there from where most Global South coastal states currently stand.

None of this diminishes what the framework offers. Blue Degrowth provides what neither degrowth nor political ecology has fully articulated alone: a coherent theoretical language connecting degrowth’s macroeconomic arguments, political ecology’s mechanisms of dispossession, and postcolonial scholarship’s attention to unequal exchange — and translating that connection into a normative and operational programme grounded in the specific conditions of the Global South. The next tasks are empirical, comparative, and political: testing these causal pathways across diverse coastal contexts; developing operational sufficiency metrics in partnership with communities; and building the coalitions among labour, environmental, and sovereignty movements that give Blue Degrowth political traction beyond the academy. Ocean governance will not become just by accumulating better theory. But theory that names the mechanisms of injustice precisely — and that proposes alternatives grounded in what communities already know and practice — is not a small contribution to that project.