From ‘Small Island Developing State’ to ‘Big Ocean State’: The Blue Economy and the Improvised (Re)Scaling of an Ocean Country

This paper tracks the recent performative (re)scaling that state officials in the Republic of Seychelles, an archipelagic state in the Western Indian Ocean, have been articulating with the early adoption of a novel ocean-focused development paradigm—namely, the Blue Economy. In doing so, it articulates the diverse practices these actors have mobilised to enact environmental governance so that Seychelles could turn from being a ‘small island state’ to a ‘big ocean state’—practices that offer a glimpse into the geopolitical improvisations of environmental state making at the margins. Based on 12-month fieldwork in the country, the paper empirically maps how Seychellois state officials have repurposed some of the definitional features that debt restructuring-based Blue Economy projects now exhibit globally—exemplified by moving from Marine Protected Areas to a Marine Spatial Plan, the definition of a 30% protection target in deep waters, or the scripting of their own oceanic vocabulary—to shift the narrative from being a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) towards a Big Ocean State (BOS[S]). Ultimately, the improvised (ocean) state emerging from this account serves to historically situate the comings-together of an expanding debt-fuelled Blue Economy, while articulating novel geopolitical terrains where power asymmetries are jostled, subjectivities and spaces are performatively brought into being, and environmental state-making is tentatively (re)produced.