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The Blue Economy has gained traction as a key concept that seeks to stem biodiversity loss whilst stimulating economic development, thereby integrating environmental and economic interests. Although the Blue Economy builds on the more familiar Green Economy, academic critique is still emerging and can be slow to translate into changes in policy and practice. What the Blue Economy means to national and local policy makers and practioners is seldom explored, and specificity is lacking on how the triple bottom line of economic growth, environmental sustainability, and social equity can be attained. This article explores these issues in one of the pioneering nations promoting the Blue Economy – the Republic of Seychelles – to establish a) how policy makers and practitioners in Seychelles perceive the Blue Economy b) what perspectives influence the concept; and c) who stands to gain or lose from its implementation. Seychelles has a unique position in Africa, due to its remote location in the Indian Ocean, its political history, and its pioneering role in promoting the Blue Economy: it presents itself as a leader for Africa in this respect. Using a combination of interviews and Q-methodology, we identify three perspectives on the Blue Economy in the country. Policymakers and practitioners are either: supportive in principle, critical in practice; pragmatic and accepting; or idealistic. These three perspectives capture the interpretations of those tasked with enacting the Blue Economy, but many of the perspectives present in international discourse are not present in the country, and indeed elements of them are met with resistance. Drawing on a social network analysis we find that the critical perspective is most influential in terms of information, both with government and non-government actors. However, the pragmatic and accepting perspective is more influential in terms of resource allocation, indicating a lack of resources could hamper actions by the actors that would like to see change.Keywords: Blue Economy, blue growth, oceans economy, Seychelles, Africa, Q Methodology, network analysis, natural capital

The Blue Economy concept is being embraced enthusiastically in Africa, both internally and externally. However, this new framing creates and calls for new understandings of how actors and places relate to one another, control, and create meaning and value. Thus, understanding the ocean - and its conceptual and material fabric - in this context, is a matter of political ecology, raising a number of questions that extend across geographies, spatio-temporalities, and political actors, both human and more-than-human. In this article, we flesh out these questions. An understanding of historical efforts to legally secure oceanic space can help contextualize the emergent African blue economy, one which we propose rests predominantly on the notion of 'security.' We demonstrate how resources are economically, environmentally, and politically 'secured' as they are first constructed as economic objects of accumulation, then militarized as matters of geopolitical security, and finally controlled through technologies of monitoring, surveillance, and resistance. The 'security' of the blue growth agenda and its effects operates across different temporal and spatial dimensions and are realized in different ways across the continent as explored in the six articles in this Special Section.Keywords: blue economy, deep sea mining, political ecology, oceanic space, security

Ecosystem services have become a dominant paradigm for understanding how people derive well-being from ecosystems. However, the framework has been critiqued for over-emphasizing the availability of services as a proxy for benefits, and thus missing the socially-stratified ways that people access ecosys- tem services. We aim to contribute to ecosystem services' theoretical treatment of access by drawing on ideas from political ecology (legitimacy) and anthropology (entanglement). We hypothesize that where customary and modern forms of resource management co-exist, changes in customary institutions will also change people's ability to and means of benefiting from ecosystem services, with implications for well-being. We ask a) what are the constellations of social, economic, and institutional mechanisms that enable or hinder access to a range of provisioning ecosystem services; and b) how are these constellations shifting as different elements of customary institutions gain or lose legitimacy in the process of entangle- ment with modernity? Through a qualitative mixed-methods case study in a coastal atoll community in Papua New Guinea, we identify key access mechanisms across the value chain of marine provisioning ser- vices. Our study finds the legitimacy of customary systems – and thus their power in shaping access – has eroded unevenly for some ecosystem services, and some people within the community (e.g. younger men), and less for others (e.g. women), and that different marine provisioning services are shaped by specific access mechanisms, which vary along the value chain. Our findings suggest that attention to entanglement and legitimacy can help ecosystem services approaches capture the dynamic and relational aspects of power that shape how people navigate access to resources in a changing world. We contend that viewing power as relational illuminates how customary institutions lose or gain legitimacy as they become entangled with modernity.

To minimize the impacts of climate change on human wellbeing, governments, development agencies, and civil society organizations have made substantial investments in improving people's capacity to adapt to change. Yet to date, these investments have tended to focus on a very narrow understanding of adaptive capacity. Here, we propose an approach to build adaptive capacity across five domains: the assets that people can draw upon in times of need; the flexibility to change strategies; the ability to organize and act collectively; learning to recognize and respond to change; and the agency to determine whether to change or not.

Source at https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00171. ; The vast developmental opportunities offered by the world's coasts and oceans have attracted the attention of governments, private enterprises, philanthropic organizations, and international conservation organizations. High-profile dialogue and policy decisions on the future of the ocean are informed largely by economic and ecological research. Key insights from the social sciences raise concerns for food and nutrition security, livelihoods and social justice, but these have yet to gain traction with investors and the policy discourse on transforming ocean governance. The largest group of ocean-users – women and men who service, fish and trade from small-scale fisheries (SSF) – argue that they have been marginalized from the dialogue between international environmental and economic actors that is determining strategies for the future of the ocean. Blue Economy or Blue Growth initiatives see the ocean as the new economic frontier and imply an alignment with social objectives and SSF concerns. Deeper analysis reveals fundamental differences in ideologies, priorities and approaches. We argue that SSF are being subtly and overtly squeezed for geographic, political and economic space by larger scale economic and environmental conservation interests, jeopardizing the substantial benefits SSF provide through the livelihoods of millions of women and men, for the food security of around four billion consumers globally, and in the developing world, as a key source of micro-nutrients and protein for over a billion low-income consumers. Here, we bring insights from social science and SSF to explore how ocean governance might better account for social dimensions of fisheries.