Background The Blue Economy has emerged as the dominant paradigm for ocean governance, promising to reconcile maritime economic expansion with environmental protection through technological innovation and market instruments. However, it rests on theoretically precarious commitments: absolute decoupling of growth from environmental degradation, techno-managerial universalism, and marketisation of marine commons. This article develops a theoretical critique of the Blue Economy by synthesizing degrowth scholarship and political ecology to expose how growth-compatible ocean governance reproduces dispossession, intensification, and unequal exchange in Global South contexts. Methods This literature-based study employs purposive sampling and thematic synthesis to build a conceptual critique. The analysis centers degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and deploys political ecology concepts—enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange—to trace causal mechanisms through which Blue Economy policies produce unjust distributive outcomes. Literature selection prioritized canonical degrowth texts, foundational political ecology works, and critical Blue Economy scholarship. An illustrative composite vignette from Indonesian coastal contexts grounds the theoretical arguments. Results The synthesis yields six interrelated critiques demonstrating that the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing privileges market valuation over plural values; decoupling assumptions are empirically fragile and undermined by rebound effects and problem-shifting; market instruments commodify commons and enable governance capture; Blue Economy projects function as spatial fixes reproducing accumulation by dispossession; distributional outcomes are regressive; and techno-optimism masks problem-shifting. The article develops Blue Degrowth as a normative alternative, articulating five principles—limits and sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, local value retention, and democratic deliberation—and translates these into policy modalities including legal recognition of customary marine tenure, cooperative processing, precautionary moratoria, and alternative metrics beyond GDP. Conclusions Blue Degrowth offers a framework for just ocean governance that fundamentally breaks from growth-centric paradigms. Future research should test causal mechanisms through comparative studies, develop participatory sufficiency metrics, and explore coalition-building strategies for implementation in diverse Global South settings.
Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere (Fri,) studied this question.