Mare Autonomia – Post-growth Ocean futures

Despite growing awareness that the pursuit of endless economic growth is the main driver of expansion and intensification of destructive practices, future scenarios for the Ocean often lack explicit critique of transnational capitalism. We expand the field by developing a post-growth future scenario for Ocean Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ). We employed Science-Fiction (SciFi) prototyping to explore how “seeds” of post-growth thinking in current legislation could disrupt traditional open Ocean governance. The scenario consists of four SciFi short stories (windows into the future, or scenario “vignettes”) concerning shipping, fishing, marine biotechnology and deep-sea mining, and a prototype Ocean treaty describing underlying governance principles.

Subjecting the scenario to experts allowed us to uncover imaginaries linked to the dominant growth paradigm hindering interviewees from seeing our scenario as a plausible Ocean future and illustrated the importance of relational imagination in envisioning radically different futures. We conclude that a business-as-usual Ocean future is not inherently more plausible than a post-growth Ocean future, and that engaging with creative scenarios can improve our capabilities in critically reflecting over the stories told about our present to de-naturalise the injustices they allow for.