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

Abstract

As an emergent and rapidly propagating concept through which the hydrological sphere of the earth is identified as a new economic possibility, the Blue Economy is traveling globally and is being localized differently. Adding to Winder and Le Heron’s interrogation of the Blue Economy as an investment-institutional project that creates new biological–economic knowledge and relations, I argue that the Blue Economy is necessarily a complex governmental project that opens up new governable spaces and rationalizes particular ways of governing. By demonstrating how China’s marine economy is being assembled and practiced in ways that not only open up new space for accumulation but also create new spatial rationalities that rearrange people and resources, I urge geographers to be attentive to the questions of space, rationality, and power in specific geographic contexts where the Blue Economy is being localized.