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Short abstract:

This paper explores one key reason for the weakness of most attempts to enact a blue bioeconomy: the reductionistic ways in which they deal with the agencies of marine entities, opting for docile versions that could be easily traded on markets at the expense of their biological complexity.

Long abstract:

In recent years the concept of the blue bioeconomies (BB) has been presented as a way for marine-based industries to break with traditional models of relentless extraction and extensive damage. Centering on innovation and biotechnological enhancement, BB promises future marine-based economies of continual growth and sustainability. In practice it has proven quite hard to materialize these promises, the bioeconomy still mostly an object of imagination rather than a reality. On this paper we are going to explore one key reason for this lack of effect: the reductionistic ways in which most BB proposals deal with the agencies of marine entities. Adopting a conceptual frame from science and technology studies (STS), it will understand this engagement as “pacification”, or a strategy based on producing neat and simple versions of these beings that could be easily traded on markets, at the expense of their biological complexity. To explore the ways on which pacification works the paper analyzes current attempts at renovating the seaweed industry in Chile. Through the analysis of two BB-inspired policy proposals – one focused on turning seaweed into the basis of a blue carbon economy and the other into high-end “novel foods” for export – it will present them as producing highly pacified versions of seaweed that bear little resemblance with the complex beings populating Chilean seas. Pacified seaweed comes very handy for market-oriented policy proposals but tend to fare quite poorly beyond them.