The Indian Ocean as an (Un)common Place of Transformation: Challenges and Potentialities Beyond Blue Economy Policies in the Comoros Islands

Abstract

This article examines the Comoros as a critical site for rethinking the Indian Ocean beyond dominant blue economy narratives. Through ethnographic engagement with artisanal fishermen, it explores how everyday maritime practices, sensory knowledge, and oceanic imaginaries complicate policy-driven visions of sustainable development. While blue economy discourse frames the Indian Ocean as a frontier of sustainable growth, in the Comoros, it intersects with longer histories of marginalization, failed development schemes, illegal extraction, and uneven global market integration.  Artisanal fishers occupy a paradoxical position: historically stigmatized within social hierarchies yet newly targeted by conservation and maritime development initiatives. Their experiences reveal continuities between the economization of the sea and contemporary sustainability agendas, challenging the presumed rupture between exploitative and ecological paradigms. The Comorian artisanal fishers’ ways of inhabiting, perceiving, and imagining the sea offer a situated lens through which to interrogate the expanding blue economy in the Western Indian Ocean. By tracing ethnographic assemblages that emerge from everyday maritime practices, this article explores how global conservation and restoration policies intersect with local histories of marginality, ecological knowledge, and social identity. In so doing, it shows how the Comoros—positioned within a wider Indian Ocean seascape—becomes a site where oceanic futures are negotiated through both vulnerability and possibility, revealing the sea as a material, imaginative, and political space.