Picturing the coast: unravelling community perceptions of seascapes, Blue Growth and coastal change

Abstract

Blue Growth is gaining momentum, opening up new frontiers for economic development, with potentially negative impacts on coastal communities and seascapes. The impact of Blue Growth projects on communities and seascapes is generally understood through narrow technical or economic approaches that focus on the potential loss of coastal views or the depreciating impacts on property values, ignoring the complex relationships communities have with seascapes. These approaches often dislodge non-quantifiable community-seascape relationships from Blue Growth strategies, leading to community frustration and contestation. Understanding community-seascape relationships is key to developing more locally attuned Blue Growth strategies. We conceptualise seascapes as a triadic space incorporating perceived, conceived and lived dimensions. These dimensions have an impact on how communities experience and respond to contestation. We use a participatory photo-elicitation methodology with two community groups on the west coast of Ireland to understand how contestation occurs in places faced with multiple Blue Growth pressures and the mechanisms communities deploy in response. We find that although communities care deeply about changes taking place at the coast and sea and frame their ‘common’ landscapes as cultural assets that are worthy of defence, community practices remain impotently emotional or focused on ephemeral oppositions to specific Blue Growth developments. Such responses, however, are not strong enough for sufficiently mobilising a sustainable solution to dominant growth models. We suggest that if communities are properly supported to invest in knowledge, skills, networks and assets, they can mobilise more sustainable solutions to dominant growth models that threaten their coastal seascapes and cultural heritage. Finally, we highlight the transformative potential of the lived space of communities, not as a descriptor of a different typology of coastal landscape, but rather as a resource to understand how communities affected by multiple pressures can understand their options, capacity to resist and what their goal might be for the future of the coast.