Encountering the Blue Economy through Event Ethnography: A Methodological Reflection on the Geographies of Policymaking

This article offers a methodological reflection on adopting a particular type of ethnography—event ethnography—to engage with the production and circulation of policy realities. Responding to recent geographical calls asking us to critically investigate the Blue Economy (BE)—a recent policy paradigm supposedly ensuring economic development, social well-being, and environmental sustainability—I detail my choice of event ethnography as the primary methodological choice informing my encounter with one such paradigm in the archipelagic state of the Republic of Seychelles. In doing so, this article expands on current qualitative methodological approaches for the study of the BE by foregrounding the potentialities of event ethnography as a generative approach to engage with “policies in-the-making.” Ultimately, I posit that event ethnography provides an additional and unique methodological entry point to presently dominant normative and prescriptive analyses of BE projects. Simultaneously, and beyond the BE as a research problematic per se, I suggest that event ethnography affords geographers with rare spatiotemporal configurations to productively engage with the messiness and heterogeneity of policy realities—be those global in reach, or unfolding in more localized scales—especially when those realities are in-the-making.