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Presentation short abstract

In Southeast Asia, the proliferation of the blue economy enables the expansion of novel digital agri-technologies that make seaweed farmers investable entities by individualizing decision-making, disrupting production relationships, and constructing new frontiers of extraction.

Presentation long abstract

Transnational blue economy discourse is operationalized via projects of financialization and digitalization in marine spaces by new assemblages of coastal actors, investors, and government officials, reflecting a shift in development practices to an agenda driven by the private sector. There is an absence of localised case studies of how the blue economy is constructed in marginalised coastal communities, as well as the implications for fisherfolk’s experiences of risk and risk management. To begin to fill this gap, I center my inquiry around the efforts of Coast 4C, a social enterprise within the blue economy paradigm, to introduce a cloud-based digital aquaculture platform in fisherfolk communities in Bohol, the Philippines. Through a multi-year ethnographic study in Philippine seaweed farming communities, I investigated the important local socio-natural and production relationships that shape how farmers learn and choose how to farm, as well as collaboratively experiment with new strategies. I found that the novel digital agri-technologies reconfigure these relationships by individualizing decision-making processes to encourage farmers to work more ‘smartly’ and become investable entities. Draped in apolitical terms of community empowerment, these new technologies and their data represent the continuation and deepening of capital penetration into these coastal spaces, producing new frontiers of extraction and commodification. Farmers are forced to enact complex forms of agency as they are drawn into new relationships with global markets to ensure that their knowledge and interests are not subsumed by those of blue economy developers seeking to (re)territorialize the seas.