Blueish Geographies. Entanglements and Transformations

With efforts such as the United Nations-fostered Decade of Ocean Science, aqueous spaces – of ocean, rivers, atmospheres, and all between – are increasingly posited as key enablers of wider ecological and societal transformation. A growing number of initiatives, policy frameworks, and analytical approaches have increasingly placed marine, riverine, and more broadly wet spaces at the centre of the agenda, both from institutional perspectives and in critical research as well as socio-environmental justice movements. At the same time, prominent calls for the exploitation of ‘untapped’ so-called blue resources and their political narrativising as pathways to sustainable transition under a blue growth umbrella create ecological and societal challenges (Albrecht, 2024; Bennett et al., 2021; Germond-Duret et al., 2023; Hadjimichael, 2022; Mallin & Barbesgaard, 2020). Due to their perceived role in facilitating a just, sustainable transformation, blue spaces offer a seemingly formidable locus for competing interests: livelihood, industry, conservation, leisure, and more. They enable researchers to reflect on the socio-spatial processes at work and their implications for environments and society. This collection aims to extend blue thinking and asks: How do ‘blueish’ spaces, their entities, and their socio-spatial reproduction processes engage in the multifaceted labours of assembling societal and ecological transformations to different ends and by different means?