Background The Blue Economy has emerged as the dominant paradigm for ocean governance, promising to reconcile 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. Synthesising degrowth scholarship and political ecology, this article exposes how growth-compatible ocean governance reproduces dispossession, value extraction, and ecological burden transfer in Global South contexts. Methods This literature-based study uses purposive sampling and thematic synthesis, centring degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and deploying political ecology concepts — enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange — to trace causal mechanisms through which Blue Economy policies produce unjust distributive outcomes. An illustrative composite vignette from Indonesian coastal contexts anchors the theoretical argument. Results Six interrelated critiques document widely observed tendencies in Blue Economy governance: its epistemic framing entrenches techno-managerial universalism at the expense of plural values and local knowledges; decoupling assumptions are empirically fragile, 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 advances Blue Degrowth as a normative alternative grounded in five principles — limits and sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, local value retention, and precaution and democratic deliberation — with policy modalities including customary tenure recognition, cooperative processing, precautionary moratoria, and alternative metrics beyond GDP. Conclusions Blue Degrowth offers a theoretical framework for just ocean governance that fundamentally departs from growth-centric paradigms, though its causal mechanisms require empirical testing and its policy modalities will need contextual adaptation across diverse Global South settings. 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 (Thu,) studied this question.