IKD Seminar - The Making Of A Global Blue Economy 'Governmentality': Understanding Space And Power In The Western Indian Ocean

Join us as Dr Alex Midlen discusses his doctoral research looking at the Blue Economy that is recasting the ocean as a new development frontier.

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Abstract

The Blue Economy has recently emerged as a new paradigm for ocean management, heavily promoted by international institutions. Encompasing economic development as well as environmental conservation it has recast the ocean as a new development frontier, a source of potential wealth, food and jobs. But how is the blue economy being implemented in practice, and what can we learn for its future implementation?

I interrogated the nature of the blue economy (BE) through the lens of environmental governance. I used analytical techniques based on the work of Michel Foucault (governmentalities and dispositif) and a complementary spatialised analytical framework. I based my analysis on empirical data collected in the Western Indian Ocean Region, with fieldwork in Kenya and Seychelles. Through this analysis I: 1) note the potential for BE initiatives to lead to territorialisation and enclosure of ocean space, and argue for more recognition of the importance of ‘place' in blue economy policy making; 2) analyse the rationality underpinning the blue economy as a sustainable development approach, and how it is enacted in the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) to effect the governmentalisation of a shared ocean space; 3) demonstrate how practices of inscription and subjectification are used to (re)territorialise the oceans as blue economy spaces; and 4) characterise the blue economy as a security dispositif, and call for more attention to be paid to the emergent space-time relations of the dispositif ‘in place’. I call for a blue economy, recalling earlier conceptions of economy than that of today, which privileges place-based co-management of natural resources at community scale in ways that are adaptive, prudent, and equitable.

Biography

Alex recently graduated with a DPhil from the School of  Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford having researched governance of the Blue Economy – a recent sustainable development paradigm being promoted in support of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The research focused on power relations and the blue economy discourse in small island and least developed coastal states in the Western Indian Ocean Region.

Alex graduated from the School and Geography and Environment’s Nature, Society and Environmental Governance MSc, with Distinction, in 2019 following a career in environmental policy and governance working in local government and the NGO sector in the UK and continental Europe. Alex’s work has encompassed marine protected area implementation, inshore fisheries management, protected landscapes, integrated coastal zone management, urban regeneration, and climate change adaptation and mitigation. Before his local government career Alex graduated from Queen Mary College, University of London with a BSc in Environmental Biology, going on to work as a commercial fisherman and fish farmer then gaining an MSc in Aquaculture and Fisheries Management from University of Stirling. After graduating, Alex worked at the University’s Institute of Aquaculture to support UK aid programmes in Bangladesh and Thailand before entering local government.