By Carlo Ceglia, University of Plymouth
In roughly the last decade, the ocean has come to renewed prominence as a space potentially capable of ensuring environmental sustainability, economic development, and social well-being if properly cared for, valued, and protected. Modelled on its Green counterpart, such a renewed appreciation of the ocean has primarily fallen under the banner of the ‘Blue Economy’: a loosely defined set of (global, regional, national) (policy) initiatives centred around the ocean to promote the triple-win scenario of environmental, economic, and social prosperity.
Thinking from, and like, an island
Receiving official recognition in 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio (Rio+20), some of the strongest advocates for the Blue Economy (BE) were countries identified by the UN as ‘Small Island Developing States’ (SIDS): island states with distinct circumstances such as ‘small size, geographic remoteness, narrow resource and export base [that make] them vulnerable to exogenous economic, social, and environmental shocks and crises’.
In the eyes of its islands’ proponents, the uptake of the BE served to make the case for the importance of ocean-related socio-economic activities not just for themselves, but for the world at large. In turn, such an uptake also allowed SIDS to leverage one resource many of them have in vast abundance – the ocean – to resituate their geopolitical relevance on the global stage.
Seychelles taking the lead
The Republic of Seychelles, an archipelagic state in the Western Indian Ocean, has been at the forefront of these developments. Indeed, it was one of the first countries to embrace and begin operationalising a Blue Economy agenda on a national scale, while developing novel financial instruments to ensure its funding.
Formed of 155 islands for a land area of approximately 455 square kilometres, but with jurisdictional control over an ocean territory of just above 1.3 million square kilometres (or, in legal terms, its Exclusive Economic Zone, EEZ), Seychelles’ turn towards the sea with these recent BE initiatives – and the stakes of doing so for other similar island and coastal nations – seems like an almost obvious choice.
Yet, although such a turn might seem obvious, the tactics, negotiations, and tensions of doing so are far less evident. In my work, I tracked several of those elements that Seychelles has enacted in order to become the ‘poster child’ of these recent BE developments. In particular, I adopted the analytical framing of ‘improvisation’ to articulate the diverse practices that primarily Seychellois state officials have mobilised to discursively, politically, and materially change the narrative from ‘small island’ to ‘big ocean’ state.
The following exchange I had with the former Seychelles Ambassador to the United Nations, Ronald ‘Ronny’ Jumeau, encapsulates many of those practices:
While conversing with former ambassador Jumeau, I once slipped into calling Seychelles a ‘Large Ocean State’. He raised his hand to stop me right away, slowly took a sip from his drink with practised theatricality, looked straight into my eyes and said ‘I wouldn’t’ call Seychelles a Large Ocean State, but a Big Ocean State. You know why? Because the acronym for a Large Ocean State is LOS[S], for a Big Ocean State is BOS[S]. We are not LOS[S]. We are BOS[S]’. For Ronny Jumeau, such a discursive rearticulation must follow an act of ‘political will. It’s refusing to be categorised.’ (emphasis added)
As Jumeau’s words illustrate, swapping a geographical referent – the island – for another – the ocean – effectively signals alternate terrains where geopolitics can be performed; terrains where, perhaps, state actors hailing from BOS[S] are able to make alternate, more just, claims for climate-changed futures.
The Seychelles’ BE blueprint
The BOS[S] narrative expressed by former ambassador Jumeau is one element that Seychellois state officials have adopted in order to improvise Seychelles as an ocean country. Alongside such a discursive shift, state officials have effectively catalysed the opportunities opened up by being at the forefront of these early developments to profoundly mark what forms the BE has since taken up in similar island and coastal nations.
Firstly, leveraging the techno-scientific and financial capabilities offered by working in collaboration with one of the largest environmental NGOs, the US-based The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Seychellois officials linked their struggling post-2008 economy with the governance of their ocean territory. To do so, they pioneered two world-first financial products to fund their Blue Economy agenda: the first debt restructuring (2015) and the first Blue Bond (2018) to cover, in both cases, a country’s ocean space.
Secondly, they (partially) negotiated on their own, more favourable, terms the conditionalities of those products. To take the debt restructuring as one example, Seychelles agreed to it on the proviso that TNC would facilitate an integrated Marine Spatial Plan (MSP) for the whole of Seychelles’ EEZ – that is, a plan that would allocate all activities happening within Seychelles’ waters, and the conditions under which they would take place. Additionally, the MSP would have to be accompanied by the designation of 30% Marine Protection Areas (MPAs) – a 30% target that has been primarily pushed for by Seychellois’ ‘political will’, as Jumeau would put it, on rather slippery scientific grounds.
Conclusions
In improvising a (ocean) country with the early adoption, negotiation, and operationalisation of a national BE agenda, Seychellois’ state officials have practiced sovereignty so as to politically, ethically, and materially reposition themselves as BOS[S] on a world stage. In ‘refusing to be categorised’, as Jumeau persuasively put it, Seychelles has (re)oriented some of the terms of how an ocean country should look like, for whom, and by whom.
Ultimately, such re-positionings might not necessarily disrupt the systemic inefficiencies and unequal power relations that a Blue Economy financed through debt instruments entail. Yet, what I suggest is that paying attention to state officials’ improvised tactics, negotiations, and tensions allows for more granular analyses to emerge on the messy, diverse terrains where geopolitics is played out, power dynamics are jostled, and environmental state-making is tentatively (re)produced – especially when at the margins.
About the author: Carlo Ceglia is currently a Socio-Ecological Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth, where he works on topics of multi-species justice in the offshore renewable energy sector. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Dundee. He obtained his PhD in Geography from Durham University examing the multiple mobilisations of the ocean space in the Blue Economy in the Republic of Seychelles.
Suggested further reading
Ceglia, C. (2026) “From ‘Small Island Developing State’ to ‘Big Ocean State’: The Blue Economy and the Improvised (Re)Scaling of an Ocean Country.” Geo: Geography and Environment. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.70072.
Quynh, P. T. N., T. L. T. Dinh, and E. Andriesse (2026) “Contested Coastal Governance and Livelihood Transitions: Evidence From Vietnam’s Tam Giang-Cau Hai Lagoon.” The Geographical Journal. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.70089.
How to cite
Ceglia, C. (2026, June) How to improvise a (ocean) country: Lessons from Seychelles. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/PIAX5962
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