Blue Economy threats, contradictions and resistances seen from South Africa

Patrick Bond

doi:10.2458/v26i1.23504

Abstract

South Africa hosts Africa's most advanced form of the new Blue Economy, named 'Operation Phakisa: Oceans.' In 2014, the McKinsey-designed project was formally launched by now-disgraced President Jacob Zuma with vibrant state and corporate fanfare. Financially, its most important elements were anticipated to come from corporations promoting shipping investments and port infrastructure, a new generation of offshore oil and gas extraction projects and seabed mining. However, these already conflict with underlying capitalist crisis tendencies associated with overaccumulation (overcapacity), globalization and financialization, as they played out through uneven development, commodity price volatility and excessive extraction of resources. Together this metabolic intensification of capital-nature relations can be witnessed when South Africa recently faced the Blue Economy's ecological contradictions: celebrating a massive offshore gas discovery at the same time as awareness rises about extreme coastal weather events, ocean warming and acidification (with profound threats to fast-bleaching coral reefs), sea-level rise, debilitating drought in Africa's main seaside tourist city (Cape Town), and plastic infestation of water bodies, the shoreline and vulnerable marine life. Critics of the capitalist ocean have demanded a greater state commitment to Marine Protected Areas, support for sustainable subsistence fishing and eco-tourism. But they are losing, and so more powerful resistance is needed, focusing on shifting towards post-fossil energy and transport infrastructure, agriculture and spatial planning. Given how climate change has become devastating to vulnerable coastlines – such as central Mozambique's, victim of two of the Southern Hemisphere's most intense cyclones in March-April 2019 – it is essential to better link ocean defence mechanisms to climate activism: global youth Climate Strikes and the direct action approach adopted by the likes of Dakota Access Pipe Line resistance in the US, Extinction Rebellion in Britain, and Ende Gelände in Germany. Today, as the limits to capital's crisis-displacement tactics are becoming more evident, it is the interplay of these top-down and bottom-up processes that will shape the future Blue Economy narrative, giving it either renewed legitimacy, or the kind of illegitimacy already experienced in so much South African resource-centric capitalism.Keywords: Blue Economy, capitalist crisis, Oceans Phakisa, resistance, South Africa

Highlights

Not yet fully established in the scholarly literature, the term 'Blue Economy' is becoming ubiquitous for countries with extensive coastlines
The narrative has roots in global public policy, such as the United Nations (2012) Rio+20 conference, which defined the Blue Economy as "marine-based economic development that leads to improved human wellbeing and social equity, while significantly reducing Journal of Political Ecology
Silver et al (2015: 136) assert that the Blue Economy encompasses both environmental fears, and corporate and state desires for economic and geopolitical expansion: "catalysts include ocean acidification and sea-level rise, overfishing and marine biodiversity loss, a growing consensus regarding the conservation and development potential of the high seas, and, interest from some countries in territorializing more ocean space." Kerr et al (2018: 34-35) sum up what is wrong with this process: States claim sovereign jurisdiction over their coastal waters, and private ownership of marine spaces remains rare