The Blue Economy as governmentality and the making of new spatial rationalities

The Blue Economy in the Chinese context

As Winder and Le Heron acknowledge, China is a renowned pioneer of the global Blue Economy agenda. Especially in regional governance, China not only prominently advocates the Blue Economy but also greatly influences how other member countries shape and practice the Blue Economy. ¹ China’s Blue Economy falls into Silver and colleagues’ “oceans as natural capital” model, or perhaps even a “blue growth” model in which oceans become frontier space primarily for accumulation (Silver et al., 2015). In economic terms, China’s waters, technically including internal waters, territorial seas, Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), and even the continental shelf of territorial dispute, represent 6467 billion RMB, 9.6% of the national gross domestic product (GDP) (State Oceanic Administration, 2015). The figure is expected to grow to 13% by 2020 and to 15% by 2030 (China Institute for Marine Affairs, 2013). Today, about 35% of its GDP comes from coastal tourism, 22% from transportation and logistics, 17% from fisheries, and 8% from engineering and construction (State Oceanic Administration, 2015). The government is eager to boost its Blue Economy by selectively nurturing “sustainable industries” in aquaculture and mariculture, tourism, port and transportation, offshore plant engineering, pharmaceutics, seawater utilization, renewable ocean energy, ecological restoration, and biodiversity conservation (State Council, 2013). It has also created or promoted various forms of special funds, entrepreneurial investment, and insurance schemes for risk-sharing of the emerging ocean industries (State Council, 2013). Indeed, China’s Blue Economy is an investment-institutional initiative, which in this particular context opened up sea space for accumulation.

Understanding China’s Blue Economy assemblage requires recognizing earlier institutional arrangements. China entirely revamped its sea governance in the early 2000s with the enactment of the Law on the Administration of Sea Area Use and the Marine Functional Zoning Plan. This was at once a reaction to a global process of claiming sovereign sea space through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and an institutionalization of integrated coastal management sought under the global sustainable development agenda. For the first time, China created a comprehensive sea governance system through which the country’s sovereign sea space is imagined and managed in its entirety. The law claimed all the sovereign sea space belonging to the state and mandated that those who want to use the space acquire use rights and pay use fees. Marine functional zoning allocated primary functions to each divided zone, an effort to “rationalize” messy and overlapping uses (National People’s Congress, 2001). The idea of marine economy, referring to the production generated from activities taking place at sea, took off subsequently as the National Marine Economy Development Planning program was launched in 2003.

Winder and Le Heron’s model helps explain Blue Economy development in China. Marine economy development planning prompted a multitude of actors, mostly intellectuals and government elites, to produce and circulate new knowledge in forms of statistical data, information, symbols, and images that define and explain what constitutes marine economy. For example, the annual marine economy statistics report was first released in 2004, and the new academic journal Marine Economy has published hundreds of articles since 2011. The Blue Economy, popularized throughout the 2010s in the international policy sphere, provided justifications for China to institutionalize its marine economy as a key mechanism of national sea governance. The government set up a “National Marine Economy Development 12th 5-year Plan” in 2013 as part of its national 5-year plan (2010–2015). Embedding marine economy in national development planning exploded the production of economic knowledge on the seas, which has made sovereign sea space increasingly visible and legible and effectively conceptualized it primarily as economic space. ²

The Blue Economy as governmentality and its spatial rationalities

In order to appeal to a balance between development and protection, the Blue Economy problematizes “multiple and overlapping uses in ocean and marine environments” (Winder and Le Heron, 2017). By doing so, however, it necessarily justifies intervention toward utility, efficiency, and prosperity, bringing to mind Foucault’s definition of economy: “managing people and resources so as to prosper” (Foucault, 2001a: 207). In the Chinese context, it is on the one hand an expansion of capitalist space driven by the state to the oceans, which are perceived as underdeveloped frontier spaces through which infinite possibilities of “better” uses are imagined, institutionalized, and invested. On the other hand, it is intrinsically a spatial intervention that rearranges people and resources so as to avoid waste and to achieve their economic use. In other words, infinite possibilities collide with finite space. Margo Huxley articulates how our perceptions of space can become operative rationales of government. Her account of dispositional spatial rationalities explains how the problematization of space in its current arrangement as limited, chaotic, and undisciplined justifies rearrangement “to the ends of producing profits, compliant individuals and peaceable social relations” (Huxley, 2006: 777). This kind of spatial rationalities applies to the assemblage of the Blue Economy in China, by making China’s sea space an object of discipline by visualizing it as full of conflicting, fragmented uses. In this sense, the Blue Economy is more than an economy-making project; it is necessarily a governmental project through spatial interventions, opening up new “governable spaces” and rationalizing particular ways of governing (Foucault, 2001b; Huxley, 2006).

In China’s sea governance system, marine functional zoning is the principal technique that dictates spatial rearrangement for the present and the future on multiple scales. It is justified by particular spatial rationalities valuing economic efficiency and scientism, which produce new bio-economic relations. The Law on the Administration of Sea Area Use dictates that “natural attributes,” that is, biogeophysical features or material qualities of space and resources, shall determine specific uses of each zone. But how? Here are a few examples: Biologically rich wetlands serving as important habitats for endangered migratory birds become nature reserves; Estuaries with deep water channels, an uncommon topographic feature with the capacity for accommodating containerships, are developed as industrial container ports; Shallow tidal flats that cost less to create land are reclaimed for urban and industrial development (Choi, 2015). The natural attributes have not changed; it is the new relations between the natural world and the economy, assembled in the soil of the desire for economic growth and technological optimism that justify particular uses in particular geographic places.

Blue Economy practices of seeking economic ways to use space ironically leads to the representation of sea space as potential development space and eventually to more intensive and extractive uses of sea space as a consequence. ³ Furthermore, Blue Economy signifies a new way of governing, distinguished from the use of coercive force. China’s sea governance system drives out artisanal fishers in certain places in the name of sustainable development, which may be called a sort of blue grabbing (Corson et al., 2013; Silver et al., 2015). However, this displacement takes place not through force, but through law and subsequent changes in people’s subjectivities and their relations with the seas. Foucault argued that governmentality relies on tactics rather than laws, and that laws in effect are part of tactics (Foucault, 2001a: 211). This insight seems to hold true when it comes to China’s sea governance. It is not the lack of legal institutions. Rather, the system is known among the global marine policy community for its integrity and innovation (e.g. see UNESCO IOC, 2014). Partially, it is poor enforcement of the law and policy that causes the kinds of conflicts that have been reported in the process of grabbing (China Council for International Cooperation on the Environment and Development, 2010; Hall et al., 2015; Wolford et al., 2013). More importantly, however, grabbing takes place through tactful compliance to the system, which again does not change rules but rationalities. The imposition of use rights and use fees evaporates fishers’ historical rights to the seas and turns them into temporary users subject to the new system, which puts all the different kinds of spatial uses on a level field of competition while privileging highly profitable ones. In such a system, local governments have been reported to urge people to register as sea users only to be eligible for compensation prior to their rightful acquisition or, conversely, intentionally delay issuing rights and collecting fees to make them illegal squatters. Legal and tactful, marine economy as an intervention justifies its action through constructed rationalities on space.

Conclusion

The Blue Economy, perhaps due to its ambiguity and flexibility of use while aspiring to the sustainable future of the oceans, is being celebrated by various groups that may be incompatible in other venues. The possibilities of the Blue Economy as a potential opportunity, for example, in leveraging indigenous peoples’ rights to the oceans, as seen in the case of New Zealand, should be acknowledged. Yet as I have tried to argue through this commentary, geographers need to be cautious in celebrating the Blue Economy, and should maintain a critical eye on questions of knowledge, space, and power as the concept gains popularity as it travels. Patsy Healey, in her analysis of how ideas flow transnationally, presents an interesting metaphor of “ether”—a climate of concepts, claims, narratives, and stories that are more or less concentrated near each other around a traveling idea—from which selective connections can be made with a locality of a particular context (Healey, 2013). I urge geographers to pay attention to the actual processes through which the ether of the Blue Economy touches ground, not simply as an economic project but as a specific mechanism of government in a particular geographic context (Ferguson, 2010; Rose, 1999).

China’s marine economy is hard to define merely as co-optation of environmental discourses for economic growth; it does contain radical and innovative policies and programs for reducing ecological pressure. Under the Blue Economy, it progressively expands the size of nature reserves, conducts cumulative environmental impact assessments that account for collective impacts of neighbouring development projects, adopts total quantity control for point and nonpoint pollution, and draws ecological redlines to protect sea space proactively from future development. However, we have to note that it is the same vision that ill-advisedly builds more ports and industrial complexes, transforms ecologically productive tidal flats into controversial eco-cities, and drives out local fishers from their historical dwelling grounds. These contradictory and conflicting consequences should expand our views of the Blue Economy as a complex, governmental project.