Pacifying seaweed: imagining docile objects for novel blue bioeconomies

Abstract

In recent years the blue bioeconomy has been presented as a way for marine-based industries to break with traditional models of relentless resource extraction and extensive damage on marine ecosystems. Centering in innovation and biotechnological enhancement, the concept promises a future that makes compatible continual economic growth with environmental sustainability. In practice, however, the blue bioeconomy still mostly an object of imagination than a reality. In this paper we analyze a leading cause for such lack of effectiveness: the reductionistic ways in which most blue bioeconomy proposals engage with the agencies of marine entities. Adopting an analytical frame from science and technology studies (STS), we understand the multiple strategies oriented to produce neat and simple versions of marine beings as forms of “pacification” that enable the transformation of these beings in commodities that could be easily traded in global markets, at the expense of their sociobiological complexity. To explore the ways in which pacification works, the paper analyzes current attempts at renovating the seaweed industry in Chile. Especially we analyze two policy proposals – one focused on turning seaweed into the basis of a blue carbon economy and the other centered on the potential of seaweed as high-end novel foods for export – showing how they produce a highly pacified versions of seaweed that bear little resemblance with the complex beings populating Chilean seas. Pacified seaweed comes handy for market-oriented policy proposals but tend to fare quite poorly beyond them.