Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth

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However, it rests on theoretically precarious commitments: absolute decoupling of growth from environmental degradation, techno-managerial universalism, and marketisation of marine commons. This article develops a theoretical critique of the Blue Economy by synthesizing degrowth scholarship and political ecology to expose how growth-compatible ocean governance reproduces dispossession, intensification, and unequal exchange in Global South contexts. Methods This literature-based study employs purposive sampling and thematic synthesis to build a conceptual critique. The analysis centers degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and deploys political ecology concepts—enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange—to trace causal mechanisms through which Blue Economy policies produce unjust distributive outcomes. Literature selection prioritized canonical degrowth texts, foundational political ecology works, and critical Blue Economy scholarship. An illustrative composite vignette from Indonesian coastal contexts grounds the theoretical arguments. Results The synthesis yields six interrelated critiques demonstrating that the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing privileges market valuation over plural values; decoupling assumptions are empirically fragile and undermined by rebound effects and problem-shifting; market instruments commodify commons and enable governance capture; Blue Economy projects function as spatial fixes reproducing accumulation by dispossession; distributional outcomes are regressive; and techno-optimism masks problem-shifting. The article develops Blue Degrowth as a normative alternative, articulating five principles—limits and sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, local value retention, and democratic deliberation—and translates these into policy modalities including legal recognition of customary marine tenure, cooperative processing, precautionary moratoria, and alternative metrics beyond GDP. Conclusions Blue Degrowth offers a framework for just ocean governance that fundamentally breaks from growth-centric paradigms. Future research should test causal mechanisms through comparative studies, develop participatory sufficiency metrics, and explore coalition-building strategies for implementation in diverse Global South settings. 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F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.1 ) NOTE: If applicable, it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in all citations of this article. Close Copy Citation Details Export Export Citation Sciwheel EndNote Ref. Manager Bibtex ProCite Sente EXPORT Select a format first Track Share ▬ ✚ Review Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5963-5364 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5963-5364 PUBLISHED 09 Jan 2026 Author details Author details National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere Roles: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing OPEN PEER REVIEW DETAILS REVIEWER STATUS This article is included in the Ecology and Global Change gateway. Abstract Background The Blue Economy has emerged as the dominant paradigm for ocean governance, promising to reconcile maritime economic expansion with environmental protection through technological innovation and market instruments. However, it rests on theoretically precarious commitments: absolute decoupling of growth from environmental degradation, techno-managerial universalism, and marketisation of marine commons. This article develops a theoretical critique of the Blue Economy by synthesizing degrowth scholarship and political ecology to expose how growth-compatible ocean governance reproduces dispossession, intensification, and unequal exchange in Global South contexts. Methods This literature-based study employs purposive sampling and thematic synthesis to build a conceptual critique. The analysis centers degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and deploys political ecology concepts—enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange—to trace causal mechanisms through which Blue Economy policies produce unjust distributive outcomes. Literature selection prioritized canonical degrowth texts, foundational political ecology works, and critical Blue Economy scholarship. An illustrative composite vignette from Indonesian coastal contexts grounds the theoretical arguments. Results The synthesis yields six interrelated critiques demonstrating that the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing privileges market valuation over plural values; decoupling assumptions are empirically fragile and undermined by rebound effects and problem-shifting; market instruments commodify commons and enable governance capture; Blue Economy projects function as spatial fixes reproducing accumulation by dispossession; distributional outcomes are regressive; and techno-optimism masks problem-shifting. The article develops Blue Degrowth as a normative alternative, articulating five principles—limits and sufficiency, anti-colonial delinking, commons governance, local value retention, and democratic deliberation—and translates these into policy modalities including legal recognition of customary marine tenure, cooperative processing, precautionary moratoria, and alternative metrics beyond GDP. Conclusions Blue Degrowth offers a framework for just ocean governance that fundamentally breaks from growth-centric paradigms. Future research should test causal mechanisms through comparative studies, develop participatory sufficiency metrics, and explore coalition-building strategies for implementation in diverse Global South settings. READ ALL READ LESS Keywords Blue economy, degrowth, political ecology, ocean justice, decoupling, commons, Global South Corresponding Author(s) Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere ( [email protected] ) Close Corresponding author: Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere Competing interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. Copyright: © 2026 Sulubere MB. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. How to cite: Sulubere MB. Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.1 ) First published: 09 Jan 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.1 ) Latest published: 19 Mar 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.2 )  There is a newer version of this article available. Suppress this message for one day. Introduction The Blue Economy has become a dominant policy frame for ocean governance across international institutions, national governments, and development agencies. Promoted as a pathway to reconcile economic development with marine conservation, the Blue Economy bundles a wide array of activities—fisheries modernization, aquaculture expansion, marine biotechnology, offshore renewable energy, blue carbon markets, and ecosystem service valuation—under a single rubric that promises “sustainable” growth of ocean-based sectors ( Bennett et al., 2019 ; Sumaila et al., 2021 ). Its rhetorical power rests on a set of interlocking theoretical commitments: that the ocean can be productively valued and managed through techno-managerial interventions; that market instruments and private finance can be harnessed to deliver conservation and development simultaneously; and crucially, that economic expansion can be decoupled from environmental degradation through efficiency gains and technological innovation. These commitments mirror the broader Green Growth paradigm that has dominated environmental policy debates in recent decades ( Jackson, 2009 ; Parrique et al., 2019 ). Degrowth scholarship offers a sustained and radical critique of these commitments. Rather than treating growth as a neutral policy variable, degrowth insists that perpetual GDP expansion in high-consumption societies is incompatible with planetary limits and that policies premised on absolute decoupling are empirically and theoretically precarious ( Latouche, 2009 ; Kallis, 2018 ; Hickel, 2020 ). Political ecology complements this critique by illuminating the mechanisms—enclosure, accumulation by dispossession, spatial fixes, and ecologically unequal exchange—through which ostensibly sustainable reforms can reproduce dispossession and inequality ( Harvey, 2003 ; Martínez-Alier, 2002 ; Peluso & Lund, 2011 ). When combined, degrowth and political ecology provide a powerful analytic lens for interrogating the Blue Economy’s theoretical corpus and policy agenda. This article asks: How does a degrowth political ecology reframe and dismantle the theoretical corpus of the Blue Economy, and what alternative normative and policy framework emerges when ocean governance is reconceived through degrowth principles? The inquiry is explicitly theory-first and literature-based. It centers degrowth as the primary theoretical lens and uses political ecology to trace causal mechanisms by which Blue Economy policies can produce enclosure, intensification, and unequal exchange. The analysis is oriented to the Global South: it foregrounds anti-colonial delinking, local sovereignty, and redistribution as central concerns for any just ocean governance. Empirical material is used sparingly and only to illustrate theoretical claims; the paper does not present new field data. The literature review synthesizes degrowth and political ecology literatures relevant to ocean governance and identifies the research gap this article addresses. The methodology section explains the literature selection and analytic approach. The results section presents the synthesized findings—organized as thematic critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemology, economic assumptions, governance instruments, spatial fixes, distributional effects, and techno-optimism. The discussion interprets these findings, links them to the identified gap, and develops a normative alternative, “Blue Degrowth,” with concrete policy modalities and reflections on political feasibility. The conclusion summarizes the contribution and outlines a research and policy agenda. Literature review and theoretical foundations To mount a theory tour de force critique of the Blue Economy, it is necessary to bring degrowth’s normative commitments into sustained conversation with political ecology’s mechanisms of power and enclosure. This section synthesizes the core tenets of degrowth, the critical insights of political ecology, and the ways these literatures jointly problematize the Blue Economy’s foundational assumptions. Degrowth is not a single doctrine but a family of interrelated arguments and political projects that converge on a few core claims. First, degrowth rejects the normative primacy of GDP growth in high-consumption societies: it argues that continued expansion of material throughput is incompatible with ecological limits and that policy should instead prioritize sufficiency, redistribution, and well-being ( Latouche, 2009 ; Kallis, 2018 ). Second, degrowth insists that technological efficiency alone cannot deliver the scale of environmental improvement required; efficiency gains are often offset by rebound effects and by the structural dynamics of capitalist accumulation that channel savings into further consumption ( Hickel, 2020 ). Third, degrowth emphasizes democratic, convivial forms of social provisioning—local autonomy, cooperative ownership, and commons governance—over marketization and financialization. Finally, degrowth foregrounds questions of justice: who benefits from resource use, who bears ecological burdens, and how historical patterns of colonial extraction shape contemporary inequalities ( Demaria et al., 2013 ; D’Alisa & Kallis, 2020 ). The critique of decoupling is central to degrowth. Decoupling refers to the separation of economic growth (usually measured by GDP) from environmental pressures (resource use, emissions, biodiversity loss). Degrowth scholars distinguish between relative decoupling (reduced intensity per unit of GDP) and absolute decoupling (total environmental pressures decline while GDP grows). The literature surveyed by Parrique et al. (2019) and others shows that relative decoupling is common in specific contexts and for particular indicators, but absolute decoupling at the global scale and at the speed required to meet planetary boundaries is not empirically evident and is theoretically constrained by thermodynamic and material realities ( Parrique et al., 2019 ; Hickel, 2020 ). Mechanisms that undermine decoupling include rebound effects (where efficiency gains lower costs and stimulate more consumption), problem-shifting (where solutions to one problem create others), the limited substitutability of materials, and cost-shifting through trade that externalizes environmental burdens to lower-consumption regions ( Parrique et al., 2019 ; Hickel et al., 2021, 2022 ; Hornborg, 2011 ). Degrowth therefore argues that efficiency must be complemented by sufficiency—that is, deliberate downscaling of production and consumption in wealthy regions—and by redistributive policies that reduce inequality and ecological footprints ( O’Neill et al., 2018 ). Political ecology contributes a complementary set of insights. Where degrowth supplies normative ends and macroeconomic critique, political ecology supplies mechanisms and scalar analysis that explain how policies are translated into material outcomes. Political ecology examines how power, property regimes, and institutional arrangements shape resource access and environmental change. Concepts such as accumulation by dispossession and spatial fix ( Harvey, 2003 ) explain how capital resolves crises of overaccumulation by seeking new frontiers—land, forests, and, increasingly, marine spaces—where value can be extracted and ecological costs externalized. Green grabbing literature ( Fairhead et al., 2012 ) shows how conservation and sustainability narratives can legitimize appropriation of commons through legal reforms, concessions, and market instruments. Ecologically unequal exchange theory highlights how trade and value chains can transfer ecological burdens from wealthy to poorer regions, enabling high consumption in the North while exporting environmental damage to the South ( Martínez-Alier, 2002 ; Gereffi, 1994 ). Bringing degrowth and political ecology together yields a potent analytic lens for the Blue Economy. Degrowth asks whether the Blue Economy’s growth-compatible imaginaries are normatively and biophysically defensible; political ecology asks how the instruments and institutional arrangements of the Blue Economy produce particular distributive outcomes. Together they shift the central question from “How can we grow sustainably?” to “How should we organize ocean provisioning so that human well-being is achieved within ecological limits and with justice?” This reframing has immediate implications: it challenges the epistemic authority of techno-managerial templates, problematizes market instruments as primary governance tools, and insists on place-based, commons-oriented alternatives that center local sovereignty and anti-colonial delinking. The critical Blue Economy literature provides empirical and conceptual support for these concerns. Scholars have documented how Blue Economy narratives often universalize policy templates, prioritize market solutions (public-private partnerships, payments for ecosystem services, blue bonds), and underplay power asymmetries and distributional consequences ( Bennett et al., 2019, 2021 ; Blythe et al., 2021 ; Silver et al., 2015 ). Economic framings that foreground GDP and market valuation are critiqued for obscuring non-market values and enabling rent capture by powerful actors ( Sumaila et al., 2021 ). These critiques dovetail with degrowth’s skepticism about decoupling and political ecology’s attention to enclosure and unequal exchange. Yet, despite these convergences, a gap remains. Much of the critical Blue Economy literature identifies governance risks and distributional concerns, but fewer works place degrowth at the center of the critique and systematically translate degrowth principles into a coherent policy program for ocean governance. This article addresses that gap by synthesizing degrowth and political ecology literatures and developing a “Blue Degrowth” framework that is both normative and operational—one that articulates principles, institutional modalities, and policy instruments suitable for Global South contexts while remaining attentive to political feasibility. Methods This article is a literature-based research article that employs purposive sampling and thematic synthesis to develop a theory-first critique. The methodology is designed to produce a coherent conceptual argument rather than to generate new empirical data. The literature selection began with canonical degrowth texts ( Latouche, 2009 ; Jackson, 2009 ; Kallis, 2018 ; Hickel, 2020 ) and foundational political ecology works ( Martínez-Alier, 2002 ; Robbins, 2012 ; Harvey, 2003 ). From these seeds, the review traced references to critical Blue Economy scholarship ( Silver et al., 2015 ; Bennett et al., 2019, 2021 ; Blythe et al., 2021 ) and to literatures on global value chains, green grabbing, and enclosure ( Gereffi, 1994 ; Fairhead et al., 2012 ; Peluso, 1992 ; Peluso & Lund, 2011 ). Inclusion criteria prioritized theoretical relevance to degrowth or political ecology, explicit engagement with growth, decoupling, or resource governance, and disciplinary diversity. Works that treated growth as agnostic or advanced growth-neutral policy frameworks without engaging with degrowth critiques were deprioritized to maintain theoretical coherence. Analytically, the article uses thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping. Texts were coded for recurring themes: decoupling and its critiques; market instruments and commodification; enclosure and spatial fix; distributional effects and value capture; techno-optimism and problem-shifting; and governance alternatives. Causal mechanisms were identified by tracing how policy instruments (e.g., PPPs, PES, concessions) are theorized to produce outcomes (enclosure, intensification, unequal exchange). Normative implications were derived by mapping degrowth principles onto governance alternatives and policy modalities. The method is interpretive and synthetic: it aims to produce a coherent theoretical critique and a policy program grounded in the selected literature. Results The literature synthesis yields six interrelated findings that together constitute a systematic critique of the Blue Economy from a degrowth political ecology perspective. These findings are not discrete; they interlock and reinforce one another, producing a comprehensive challenge to growth-compatible ocean governance. First, the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing privileges techno-managerial universalism and market valuation. Policy documents and institutional narratives frequently treat the ocean as a resource base amenable to optimization: ecosystem services are priced, carbon is quantified, and marine spaces are zoned according to economic potential. This epistemic stance has two problematic consequences. It reduces complex socio-ecological relations to exchange values, thereby rendering invisible non-market forms of value—cultural, spiritual, and subsistence uses—that are central to many coastal communities. It also legitimates universal policy templates that assume scalability and transferability across diverse contexts. Degrowth and political ecology critique this universalism: knowledge about marine systems is socially produced, historically situated, and embedded in power relations; ignoring this plurality risks maladaptive interventions that undermine local governance and livelihoods ( Escobar, 1995 ; Latouche, 2009 ). Second, the decoupling assumption—the idea that economic growth can be separated from environmental pressures through efficiency and technological innovation—is theoretically and empirically fragile. The degrowth literature, supported by comprehensive reviews, identifies multiple mechanisms (rebound effects, problem-shifting, limits of recycling and circularity, cost-shifting) that undermine absolute decoupling. Rebound effects are pervasive: efficiency gains lower the effective cost of resource use and can stimulate additional consumption or structural shifts that increase overall throughput ( Parrique et al., 2019 ). Rising energy expenditures for marginal extraction mean that as easy resources are depleted, extraction becomes more energy-intensive, offsetting efficiency gains. Problem-shifting occurs when technological solutions to one problem create new pressures elsewhere (for example, biofuel expansion driving land-use change). Recycling and circularity have limits: material cycles are lossy and cannot indefinitely substitute for virgin extraction in a growing economy. Finally, cost-shifting through trade allows high-consumption countries to externalize environmental burdens to lower-consumption regions, masking the true global footprint of growth ( Hornborg, 2011 ; Hickel et al., 2021, 2022 ). For ocean governance, this critique implies that policies premised on decoupling risk postponing necessary downscaling and redistribution. Third, market instruments—public-private partnerships, payments for ecosystem services, certification schemes, and blue bonds—commodify marine commons and create pathways for governance capture. Political ecology shows how marketization can reconfigure property relations and enable rent extraction. Certification regimes, for instance, often impose compliance costs on small producers while enabling premium capture by downstream actors; payments for ecosystem services can reframe stewardship as a service to be purchased rather than a collective responsibility; and blue bonds can mobilize capital but also create debt obligations and conditionalities that constrain public policy space ( Vandergeest & Unno, 2012 ). From a degrowth perspective, market instruments may be useful in narrow, carefully regulated contexts, but they cannot be the primary modality for governing ocean commons; instead, democratic, commons-based governance must be prioritized ( Fairhead et al., 2012 ; Gereffi, 1994 ). Fourth, Blue Economy projects frequently function as spatial fixes for capital, reproducing accumulation by dispossession in marine contexts. When land frontiers close or terrestrial investments yield diminishing returns, capital seeks new arenas for accumulation. The ocean—its seabed minerals, its aquaculture potential, its carbon sequestration services—becomes a new frontier. Legal reforms, concessions, and financial instruments can facilitate the transfer of access rights from customary users to private actors, producing ocean grabbing and undermining local stewardship. These processes reproduce historical patterns of colonial extraction and unequal exchange: resources and ecological burdens are shifted to the Global South while value is captured in the Global North ( Harvey, 2003 ; Hornborg & Martínez-Alier, 2016 ; Hickel et al., 2021, 2022 ). The Blue Economy’s promise of inclusive growth thus risks masking a deeper dynamic of dispossession. Fifth, distributional outcomes under Blue Economy regimes are often regressive. Value chains in marine sectors are frequently buyer-driven: processing, branding, and high-value transformation occur in the Global North, while primary production and ecological risk remain in the Global South. Producers face price volatility, precarious labor conditions, and exposure to ecological shocks, while surplus value is captured upstream. Degrowth reframes the policy objective from maximizing GDP to ensuring sufficiency, redistribution, and local value retention. Policies that prioritize cooperative processing, local ownership, and public investment in local infrastructure can help retain value locally and reduce vulnerability ( Gereffi, 1994 ; Martínez-Alier, 2002 ). Sixth, techno-optimism masks problem-shifting and governance blind spots. The Blue Economy’s faith in technological fixes—intensified aquaculture, carbon sequestration, and market-based conservation—can obscure the potential for new resource demands, novel environmental risks, and lock-in to expansionary pathways. Technological solutions often require inputs (energy, feed, minerals) that create new ecological pressures; they can legitimize further expansion by promising future mitigation; and they can concentrate control in the hands of firms that own the technologies. Degrowth advocates for precaution, low-tech place-based solutions, and policies that prioritize sufficiency over scale ( Parrique et al., 2019 ; Demaria et al., 2013 ). These findings point to causal mechanisms: market integration drives intensification and specialization, which in turn produce ecological simplification and social precarity (a Jevons-like treadmill); certification and buyer-driven chains enable value capture by downstream actors; and legal and financial instruments reconfigure access rights to favor capital. Conceptualizing these mechanisms clarifies how the Blue Economy’s theoretical assumptions translate into material outcomes and where policy interventions might interrupt harmful pathways. The remainder of the article translates these critiques into a normative and policy program: Blue Degrowth. Towards blue degrowth: principles and policy modalities If the Blue Economy’s central claims are problematic, what alternative should be proposed? Blue Degrowth is not a single policy package but a set of interlocking principles and modalities that reorient ocean governance toward sufficiency, justice, and local sovereignty. The following sections articulate core principles and translate them into institutional and policy proposals suitable for Global South contexts. At the normative level, Blue Degrowth rests on five principles. First, limits and sufficiency: policy must recognize ecological ceilings and prioritize reductions in material throughput in high-consumption contexts. This does not mean denying development to the Global South; rather, it means redistributing access to resources and prioritizing well-being over aggregate growth. Second, anti-colonial delinking: Global South states and communities should have the capacity to refuse extractive projects and to pursue selective delinking strategies that protect local sovereignty and ecological integrity. Third, commons governance: legal recognition of customary marine tenure and support for collective stewardship institutions are central to preventing enclosure and enabling sustainable provisioning. Fourth, local value retention and redistribution: policies should prioritize cooperative ownership, local processing, and public investment that capture more value locally. Fifth, precaution and democratic deliberation: governance must be precautionary, participatory, and accountable, resisting technocratic impositions that marginalize local voices. Translating these principles into policy modalities requires institutional creativity and political will. Legal recognition of customary marine tenure is a foundational step: many coastal communities manage marine resources through customary rules that are not recognized by formal law. Recognizing these rights—through co-management arrangements, community concessions, or legal pluralism—can prevent enclosure and support local stewardship ( Ostrom, 1990 ; Peluso, 1992 ; Peluso & Lund, 2011 ). Co-management should be accompanied by capacity building and resources to enable communities to monitor and enforce rules. Economic instruments should be reoriented to retain value locally. Cooperative processing facilities, community-owned enterprises, and public procurement policies that favor local producers can shift value capture away from distant intermediaries. Public financing—grants, low-interest loans, and technical assistance—can support small producers to move up the value chain without selling out to external capital. Preferential tax regimes and local content rules can also be used strategically to ensure that processing and value addition occur locally. Limits on export-oriented expansion are politically sensitive but sometimes necessary. Where expansion threatens ecological integrity or undermines local provisioning, moratoria and export limits can be justified as precautionary measures. Such limits must be accompanied by social protection and transition support—basic incomes, employment guarantees, and retraining programs—to ensure that livelihoods are not sacrificed in the name of ecological protection. Phased transitions, with clear timelines and participatory planning, can reduce social disruption. Alternative metrics and policy evaluation are essential. GDP is a poor measure of well-being and ecological sustainability. Blue Degrowth advocates for indicators that combine ecological ceilings and social foundations—measures of sufficiency, distributional equity, and local provisioning. While the precise metrics are contested within degrowth scholarship, the principle is clear: policy success should be measured by ecological and distributive outcomes, not by sectoral growth. Participatory marine spatial planning is a practical governance modality that can operationalize plural knowledges and democratic deliberation. Rather than top-down zoning driven by external investors, spatial planning should be co-designed with local communities, fishers, and customary authorities. Participatory processes can identify areas for conservation, areas for subsistence use, and areas where limited, community-led economic activity is appropriate. At the international level, trade and finance reforms are necessary to prevent cost-shifting and to support delinking strategies. Trade rules should be reformed to prevent ecological dumping and to allow policy space for local value retention. Debt relief tied to ecological restoration and public investment in local processing infrastructure can free fiscal space for Blue Degrowth transitions. International climate finance should prioritize community-led restoration and adaptation rather than marketized offsets that enable continued emissions in wealthy countries. These modalities are not exhaustive, and they will look different across contexts. Blue Degrowth is a plural, place-based program: it requires local experimentation, pilot projects, and iterative learning. Importantly, it is not anti-technology per se; rather, it is skeptical of techno-optimism as a substitute for political choices about limits and distribution. Low-tech, appropriate technologies that support local provisioning and reduce ecological footprints are often preferable to high-tech solutions that concentrate control and create new dependencies. The Indonesian illustrative vignette To ground the theoretical argument, this section synthesizes documented patterns from Indonesian coastal fisheries and aquaculture contexts into a composite illustration of the causal mechanisms identified above. The vignette draws on ethnographic, policy, and political ecology studies of customary marine tenure, market integration, and value chain dynamics in Indonesian coastal communities ( Halim et al., 2019, 2020 ; Adhuri et al., 2016 ; Thorburn, 2000, 2001 ; Mantjoro, 1996 ; Zerner, 1994 ; Bailey & Zerner, 1992 ), and is anonymized to avoid identifying any single location. In a coastal district of Indonesia, small-scale fishers and seaweed producers historically managed nearshore areas through customary rules that regulated access, seasonal closures, and gear types ( Adhuri et al., 2016 ; Thorburn, 2000, 2001 ; Bailey & Zerner, 1992 ; Zerner, 1994 ; Mantjoro, 1996 ). These customary institutions were embedded in social relations: elders mediated disputes, seasonal rituals governed harvest timing, and reciprocal labor arrangements distributed risk ( Thorburn, 2000 ; Mantjoro, 1996 ). Local provisioning—food for households, barter exchanges, and small-scale sales at local markets—was the backbone of livelihoods ( Bailey, 1988 ; Mantjoro, 1996 ). Ecological knowledge was place-based: fishers read currents, seasonal patterns, and local species behavior to manage harvests adaptively ( Thorburn, 2000, 2001 ; Bailey & Zerner, 1992 ; Zerner, 1994 ). Over the past decade, a national Blue Economy strategy promoted aquaculture intensification and export-oriented processing ( Bappenas, 2023 ; World Bank, 2021 ; Trenggono, 2025 ), effectively reframed these nearshore areas as zones of economic potential and a development pathway. Investment incentives, tax breaks, and public-private partnership models were offered to attract capital ( World Bank, 2021 ; Bappenas, 2023 ). Certification schemes that favored larger producers able to meet compliance costs ( Vandergeest & Unno, 2012 ; Bush et al., 2013 ) were introduced to access premium markets, and a processing plant was financed in the regional capital to aggregate and process raw material for export ( World Bank, 2021 ). The transition unfolded unevenly. Some producers—those with capital or social connections—were able to scale up, adopt new gear, and meet certification requirements ( Bush et al., 2013 ). Many small producers, however, faced barriers: the upfront costs of inputs and certification, the need to access processing facilities located in the regional center, and the loss of customary access as nearshore areas were reclassified for commercial use ( Bush et al., 2013 ; Vandergeest & Unno, 2012 ; Halim et al., 2019 ). This pattern exemplifies the ‘accumulation by dispossession’ mechanism theorized by Harvey (2003) , where legal reforms reconfigure property relations to favor capital accumulation. Market integration created new incentives: higher short-term prices encouraged intensification and monoculture practices that simplified habitats and increased vulnerability to pests and disease ( Bush et al., 2013 ; World Bank, 2021 ). Inputs (seed stock, feed, and chemical treatments) were increasingly purchased from outside, creating new dependencies and cash outflows ( MicroSave Consulting, 2025 ). Initially, incomes rose for some households, and local employment in processing expanded ( World Bank, 2021 ). But as production scaled, per-unit prices fell and competition increased ( Purcell et al., 2017 ; Garlock et al., 2020 ; Dahl & Oglend, 2014 ), creating the Jevons paradox. Certification compliance costs and transport expenses eroded margins for small producers ( Bush et al., 2013 ; Tsantiris et al., 2018 ). When a regional climate shock (anomalous sea temperatures and storm events) reduced yields, small producers faced price collapses and limited social protection ( Iskandar et al., 2022 ; MicroSave Consulting, 2025 ). The processing firm, integrated into global value chains, shifted sourcing to other regions with lower costs while retaining capital and profits in the national center ( Purcell et al., 2017 ). This illustrates the ‘buyer-driven value chain’ dynamics theorized by Gereffi (1994) , where downstream actors capture surplus value while externalizing risk to primary producers. As a result, local employment was precarious: casual labor, seasonal contracts, and limited labor protections meant that households had little buffer against shocks ( Statista, 2024 ; MicroSave Consulting, 2025 ). Institutional changes compounded these dynamics. Formal concessions and zoning regulations, designed to attract investment, often failed to recognize customary tenure ( Halim et al., 2019, 2020 ; World Bank, 2021 ). Where co-management arrangements were nominally established, they lacked resources and enforcement capacity ( Halim et al., 2020 ; Adhuri et al., 2016 ). Certification schemes, while marketed as inclusive, required documentation and investments that excluded many small producers ( Vandergeest & Unno, 2012 ). Financial instruments (credit lines tied to production targets) encouraged expansion but also indebtedness ( MicroSave Consulting, 2025 ). These institutional reconfigurations exemplify the ‘enclosure’ mechanisms described in the political ecology literature ( Peluso & Lund, 2011 ; Fairhead et al., 2012 ). The net effect was a reconfiguration of access and value: ecological burdens (habitat simplification, pollution, and increased vulnerability to climate variability) were concentrated locally, while value was captured by processors and exporters upstream ( Purcell et al., 2017 ; Garlock et al., 2020 ). This vignette illustrates several mechanisms identified in the theoretical analysis: market integration producing a production treadmill (a Jevons-like effect), value capture by downstream actors, and the externalization of ecological and climate risks onto precarious producers. It also shows how legal and institutional changes (formalization of concessions, certification regimes, and investment incentives) can reconfigure access and governance in ways that disadvantage customary users. The vignette is intentionally composite and anonymized; it is offered as an illustrative anchor for the causal pathways discussed above rather than as empirical proof. Discussion The degrowth political ecology critique reframes the Blue Economy debate in three interrelated ways. First, it shifts the normative horizon from growth-compatibility to limits and sufficiency. Second, it centers justice (anti-colonial delinking, reparative redistribution, and commons governance) over technocratic optimization. Third, it emphasizes plural, participatory governance over marketization and financialization. Each reframing has practical implications and raises trade-offs that must be confronted. Reframing policy evaluation around sufficiency and limits requires new metrics and political strategies. Metrics that combine ecological ceilings with social foundations can guide policy, but they also require political negotiation: who sets the ceilings, and how are social foundations defined and financed? Degrowth scholars emphasize redistribution: wealthy countries must reduce consumption and provide material and financial support to enable sustainable development in the Global South ( Kallis, 2018 ; Hickel, 2020 ). This raises geopolitical questions about responsibility, reparations, and the redistribution of ecological space that cannot be resolved by technocratic fixes alone. Anti-colonial delinking is politically fraught but necessary. Delinking does not mean isolation; it means strategic autonomy and the capacity to refuse extractive projects that reproduce dispossession. Practically, delinking can take the form of selective import substitution for critical inputs, legal protections for customary tenure, and trade policies that prioritize local value retention. These measures will face resistance from powerful economic interests and from international institutions that promote liberalized trade. Building political coalitions among social movements, local communities, progressive policymakers, and sympathetic international actors is essential. Historical precedents show that policy shifts are possible when social movements and political entrepreneurs align to create institutional openings ( Demaria et al., 2013 ). Commons governance and cooperative economic models offer practical alternatives to marketization, but they require institutional support. Legal recognition of customary rights, access to finance, technical assistance, and supportive procurement policies are necessary to make commons governance viable. Public investment in local processing and infrastructure can reduce dependency on buyer-driven chains, but such investments require fiscal space and political commitment. Debt relief and international climate finance can help create that space, but they must be structured to avoid new conditionalities that undermine sovereignty. Addressing trade-offs around livelihoods and food security is critical. Phased transitions, social protection measures (basic incomes, employment guarantees), and retraining programs can mitigate social disruption. Pilot projects and place-based experiments can demonstrate viable pathways and build political support. Most importantly, transitions must be co-designed with affected communities to ensure legitimacy and effectiveness. The vignette above illustrates how top-down Blue Economy strategies can produce short-term gains but long-term vulnerabilities; Blue Degrowth insists that transitions be designed to enhance resilience and local provisioning rather than to maximize export earnings. Political feasibility depends on strategy. Degrowth proposals are often dismissed as utopian or politically unrealistic. Yet history shows that major policy shifts (welfare states, land reforms, environmental regulations) have been achieved through coalition building, social movements, and institutional entrepreneurship. Blue Degrowth requires similar strategies: building alliances across labor, environmental, and community groups; leveraging legal avenues to secure rights; and using pilot successes to scale up reforms. International solidarity and normative pressure, through transnational networks and progressive institutions, can also create enabling conditions. Finally, research and practice must be iterative. Comparative empirical studies can test the causal mechanisms identified here and refine policy modalities. Interdisciplinary collaborations, combining political ecology, ecological economics, law, and development studies, are essential to design context-sensitive Blue Degrowth interventions. Metrics and monitoring systems must be developed in partnership with communities to ensure they reflect local priorities and ecological realities. Conclusion This article has argued that a degrowth political ecology reframes and deepens the critique of the Blue Economy. By centering limits, sufficiency, and anti-colonial delinking, degrowth challenges the Blue Economy’s reliance on absolute decoupling, marketization, and techno-optimism. Political ecology supplies mechanisms (enclosure, spatial fix, and ecologically unequal exchange) that explain how Blue Economy policies can reproduce dispossession and inequality. Together, these literatures point toward a “Blue Degrowth” alternative: a normative and policy framework that prioritizes commons governance, local value retention, precautionary limits on expansion, and redistributive measures to ensure ecological sustainability and social justice. The contribution of this article is theoretical and synthetic: it consolidates degrowth and political ecology critiques into a coherent program for rethinking ocean governance. The next steps are empirical and political: testing the causal pathways identified here in comparative case studies, developing operational metrics for sufficiency in marine contexts, and exploring political strategies for implementing Blue Degrowth policies in diverse Global South settings. If ocean governance is to be just and sustainable, it must move beyond growth-centric imaginaries and toward plural, place-based alternatives that respect ecological limits and local sovereignty. Data availability No data are associated with this article. References Adhuri DS, Rachmawati L, Sofyanto H, et al. : Green market for small people: Markets and opportunities for upgrading in small-scale fisheries in Indonesia. Mar. Policy. 2016; 63 : 198–205. 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Publisher Full Text Zerner C: Through a Green Lens: The Construction of Customary Environmental Law and Community in Indonesia’s Maluku Islands. Law Soc. Rev. 1994; 28 (5): 1079–1122. Publisher Full Text Comments on this article Comments (0) Version 2 VERSION 2 PUBLISHED 09 Jan 2026 ADD YOUR COMMENT Comment Author details Author details National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere Roles: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Formal Analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project Administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing Competing interests No competing interests were disclosed. Grant information The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work. Article Versions (2) version 2 Revised Published: 19 Mar 2026, 15:34 https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.2 version 1 Published: 09 Jan 2026, 15:34 https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.1 Copyright © 2026 Sulubere MB. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Download Export To Sciwheel Bibtex EndNote ProCite Ref. Manager (RIS) Sente metrics Views Downloads F1000Research - - PubMed Central info_outline Data from PMC are received and updated monthly. - - Citations open_in_new 0 open_in_new 0 open_in_new SEE MORE DETAILS CITE how to cite this article Sulubere MB. Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.176456.1 ) NOTE: If applicable, it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in all citations of this article. COPY CITATION DETAILS track receive updates on this article Track an article to receive email alerts on any updates to this article. TRACK THIS ARTICLE Share Open Peer Review Current Reviewer Status: ? Key to Reviewer Statuses VIEW HIDE Approved The paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested Approved with reservations A number of small changes, sometimes more significant revisions are required to address specific details and improve the papers academic merit. Not approved Fundamental flaws in the paper seriously undermine the findings and conclusions Version 1 VERSION 1 PUBLISHED 09 Jan 2026 Views 0 Cite How to cite this report: Ertör I. Reviewer Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r451007 ) The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-451007 NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. Close Copy Citation Details Reviewer Report 13 Mar 2026 Irmak Ertör , Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey Approved with Reservations VIEWS 0 https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r451007 This is a well-developed and well-structured article engaging with a timely and critical contribution to the existing (and expanding) scholarship on degrowth and political ecology in relation to marine governance. The manuscript also places particular emphasis on the Global South, ... Continue reading READ ALL This is a well-developed and well-structured article engaging with a timely and critical contribution to the existing (and expanding) scholarship on degrowth and political ecology in relation to marine governance. The manuscript also places particular emphasis on the Global South, which represents a meaningful and valuable contribution to the literature. The author makes use of a substantial body of references and seeks to bridge these two strands of literature (degrowth & political ecology), while advancing a significant critique of the Blue Economy scholarship, parts of which overlook insights from ecological economics as well as the power dynamics embedded within broader political economic systems. I find that the framing of ‘theoretically precarious commitments/assumptions’ makes sense and is well explained. I also think that the six interrelated critiques, as well as the five principles of Blue Degrowth are nicely developed. The elaboration of four policy modalities is also meaningful, however, I’m not sure whether other modalities should /could be integrated in the same manner (such as participatory Marine Spatial Planning models or political reforms limiting the financialization mechanisms of Blue Economy / blue carbon / blue debt, for instance, see the discussion by Andre Standing on the financialization of marine conservation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41301-023-00379-y or https://www.tni.org/en/article/the-financialization-of-conservation ) Maybe the author might consider adding a note that this is not a closed list of policy modalities. One important missing part is the following: the author has not referred at all to the existing “Blue Degrowth” scholarship. I agree that there is still a gap that this article addresses nicely. However, while reading the manuscript, it rather sounds as if the author coined the term /concept with this text, which is not correct. If the manuscript engages with the existing Blue Degrowth scholarship, it will make a greater contribution to the already existing debates. Therefore, I recommend strengthening the manuscript and its engagement with current debates by incorporating some recent literature: First and foremost, the author should cover the existing blue degrowth scholarship and position his/her arguments and critical gaze according to the existing discussions in this scholarship (do you agree or contrast the existing BDG arguments?): a. As far as I know, Maria Hadjimichael is the scholar who first coined the term in her (2018) article (please see “A call for a blue degrowth: Unravelling the European Union's fisheries and maritime policies.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308597X17305687) b. I would strongly recommend having a look at the Special Issue on Blue Degrowth (2020) published in the journal Sustainability Science with a main Editorial text and 12 case studies exploring the concept. For the editorial, see: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-019-00772-y For the entire Special Issue: https://link.springer.com/collections/gfbiaaaich c. If you write “blue degrowth” to Google Scholar, you will also find other book chapters as well as glossary entries written by a range of diverse authors. It would make sense to cover those and position the author’s own perspective or clarify his/her theoretical and empirical contribution to the existing bulk of literature 2. Some more recent discussions around ecological economics, degrowth, and political ecology need to be added. (The author referred to some key references in both fields. However, even though they are not totally outdated -see for example, Martinez-Alier 2002-, there is a wide recent scholarship building on these, which are currently missing in the text). I do not expect citing all of them, but I do think that the author can engage with some more recent literature as well. It would strengthen the theoretical debate and its critical intervention. 3. The recently published book chapter on “Blue Economy” (Chapter 37. The Blue Economy by Rosanna Carver and Adam Jadhav ) is also an important recent reference to engage with. 4. Methods: “Analytically, the article uses thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping”. Please clarify how…. The coding process is well explained, but how did the author develop the conceptual mapping (what does it mean in this case?)? 5. I am not sure whether “causal mechanisms” is the most appropriate framing for what the author seeks to accomplish when incorporating a political ecology perspective. It is not a major point, it can stay as it is, but please think about whether another framing would make your message clearer. 6. “Degrowth Political Ecology” sounds somewhat strange as a term. Degrowth and Political Ecology constitute two distinct bodies of literature that are relevant to one another and also enrich each other (and in some cases, they do overlap). However, it remains unclear whether this particular conceptualization (DPE) adds significant value to the debate. Minor comments: Literature review, first sentence: I would add “political ecology’s mechanisms [“to uncover”] power and enclosure. Otherwise, the sentence gets a bit confusing. When discussing the critique of decoupling in the literature review, the author might add an earlier reference to the ecological economics roots of degrowth (and decoupling) debates. Paragraph beginning with “Political ecology contributes [to this debate with] a complementary set of insights.] When the author talks about “new frontiers”, I think there is the need of providing a reference to the debates on “marine commodity frontiers” as well as “blue / ocean grabbing”. Consider adding the term “social” in the sentence finishing with: “exporting environmental [and social] damage to the South”. Methods: It needs to be clarified with the editors whether this manuscript is a “literature-based research article” or a “review article”. Both conceptualizations would fit. Methods, second paragraph: Regarding “foundational political ecology works”, the author should cite both books (edited volumes) on Political Ecology published in 2015; and the recent version of the Routledge Handbook on Political Ecology (published in 2025). Results: Regarding the “market instruments”, I think Andre Standing’s excellent work might be cited. Results: “Ocean grabbing” has not been referenced. Some references linked to marine (commodity) frontiers would also enrich the debate. Results, “distributional outcomes”: The sentence beginning with “Producers face price volatility,…” needs a reference. Results, “techno- optimism”: The author might consider adding a small part on intensive aquaculture and fish feed production. This is not indispensable, though. Regarding the causal mechanisms, I would suggest two articles: Gavin Bridge, Matrial Worlds and Ertör-Akyazı et al. (2025) where the authors discuss aquaculture eand fish heed production together with certification issues. The title “Towards blue degrowth: …” needs to appear bold. In the part discussing “alternative metrics and policy evaluation”, the author might consider discussing blue doughnut literature. The in-text reference (Bappenas, 2023) is missing in the reference list. Please add. “Addressing trade-offs around livelihoods and food security…” Please consider adding ‘food sovereignty’ concept which fits better to your political ecology debate. Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Partly Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Partly Is the review written in accessible language? Yes Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Yes Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: Political ecology, political economy, marine social sciences, blue degrowth, ecological economics, socio-environmental conflicts and environmental justice, agrarian change and peasant studies I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. Close READ LESS CITE CITE HOW TO CITE THIS REPORT Ertör I. Reviewer Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r451007 ) The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-451007 NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in all citations of this article. COPY CITATION DETAILS Report a concern Respond or Comment COMMENT ON THIS REPORT Views 0 Cite How to cite this report: Papadaki L. Reviewer Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454319 ) The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-454319 NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. Close Copy Citation Details Reviewer Report 14 Feb 2026 Lydia Papadaki , Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece Approved with Reservations VIEWS 0 https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454319 This manuscript presents a timely and intellectually stimulating conceptual review introducing “Blue Degrowth” as a framework for just ocean governance beyond growth-oriented paradigms. The topic is highly relevant given ongoing debates around blue economy expansion, sustainability transitions, and justice in ... Continue reading READ ALL This manuscript presents a timely and intellectually stimulating conceptual review introducing “Blue Degrowth” as a framework for just ocean governance beyond growth-oriented paradigms. The topic is highly relevant given ongoing debates around blue economy expansion, sustainability transitions, and justice in marine governance. The article engages meaningfully with degrowth theory, political ecology, and critiques of neoliberal ocean governance, offering a normative reorientation that contributes to emerging discussions in the field. However, the review is only partly comprehensive in relation to the broader ocean governance literature. While it draws effectively from degrowth and critical political economy scholarship, engagement with mainstream marine spatial planning (MSP), blue economy policy frameworks, and empirical governance case studies could be strengthened to ensure a more balanced overview. Incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. Most factual statements are supported by citations, but several normative or generalised claims (e.g., regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance or uniform impacts of blue economy initiatives) would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or acknowledgment of counterexamples. Strengthening citation support in these areas would enhance scientific robustness. The manuscript is written in clear and accessible language. Key concepts such as degrowth, blue economy, and justice are explained adequately, making the review readable to interdisciplinary audiences. The structure is coherent and the argument progresses logically. The conclusions are thought-provoking and largely appropriate; however, they would benefit from clearer delineation between normative advocacy and literature-based synthesis. The article could be strengthened by more explicitly acknowledging limitations of the Blue Degrowth framework, discussing implementation challenges, and identifying areas where empirical research is still needed. Clarifying the scope of applicability (e.g., Global North vs. Global South contexts) would also improve analytical precision. Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific soundness: Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview. Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims. Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework. Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions. Overall, the manuscript makes a valuable conceptual contribution but requires moderate revisions to ensure comprehensiveness and balance as a review article. Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Partly Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Partly Is the review written in accessible language? Yes Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Partly Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: Socio-economics and systems innovation with several studies on the blue economy I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. Close READ LESS CITE CITE HOW TO CITE THIS REPORT Papadaki L. Reviewer Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454319 ) The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-454319 NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in all citations of this article. COPY CITATION DETAILS Report a concern Author Response 24 Feb 2026 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere , National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia 24 Feb 2026 Author Response Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor ... Continue reading Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor qualification and will be addressed in the revision. The one point requiring a more substantive response — broadening engagement with mainstream scholarship — is not a rejection of the concern but a reframing of how that engagement is best understood given the article’s critical purpose. 1. The nature and purpose of this article A brief restatement of the article’s purpose is needed here, as it bears directly on how several of Reviewer 2’s suggestions should be interpreted and acted upon. This article is not a bibliographic survey of ocean governance or blue economy scholarship. It is a critical theoretical intervention: its stated aim is to critically examine and challenge the growth-compatible theoretical commitments of the Blue Economy paradigm — decoupling assumptions, techno-managerial universalism, market-based governance, and spatial fix dynamics — and to propose an alternative normative framework grounded in degrowth and political ecology. The mainstream blue economy literature, including institutional policy frameworks and MSP scholarship, appears in the article — but as the object of critique rather than as a co-equal tradition whose merits are weighed symmetrically. This distinction — between mainstream literature as missing knowledge and mainstream literature as the target of critique — matters for how Point 1 is addressed. It also shapes how Points 3 and 4 should be read, where the article’s normative commitments are not incidental but constitutive of its contribution. With that framing stated, I address each point in turn. 2. Response to Point 1: “Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview” I accept the concern that underlies this point and partially accept its practical recommendation, but I must also contest the implicit standard of comprehensiveness on which it rests. Reviewer 2 suggests that incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. I do not dismiss it, as this is a reasonable disciplinary instinct. However, this article is a critical intervention with a defined analytical purpose, not a balanced survey of the field. The critical Blue Economy literature, degrowth scholarship, and political ecology frameworks are placed at the centre precisely because they constitute the analytical toolkit through which the mainstream paradigm is examined. The article’s critical orientation is not incidental; it is the condition of its contribution. That said, I accept the substance of the reviewer’s concern: if mainstream works are absent rather than visibly engaged, the article becomes vulnerable to the charge of attacking a theoretical straw man rather than the actual literature. Accordingly, in the revision I will add a small number of representative mainstream references — including canonical institutional definitions (World Bank blue economy frameworks, OECD ocean economy reports) and key mainstream blue economy scholarship — cited explicitly as the primary policy and scholarly expressions of the growthism orthodoxy the article deconstructs. Voyer et al.’s (2018) “Shades of Blue” will also be incorporated, as it provides a nuanced mapping of competing blue economy interpretations that usefully anchors the mainstream-to-critical spectrum. These additions will be cited as the targets of the critique rather than as supplementary literature, which satisfies the call for greater comprehensiveness without shifting the article’s analytical position. No further reference additions beyond these and those needed for Point 2 below are anticipated. 3. Response to Point 2: “Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims” I accept this point in full. Several normative or generalised claims — regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance and the characterisation of blue economy initiatives as producing uniform distributional impacts — would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or, where full grounding is not available, clearer acknowledgment of variation and counterexamples. The revision will address this in two ways. They will be added where additional empirical citations can support specific broad claims without distorting them. Where claims describe structural tendencies rather than universal outcomes — a distinction the article intends but does not always make sufficiently clear — explicit qualifying language will be introduced. This point connects directly to the scope clarification Reviewer 1 also raised, and the same revision will address both simultaneously. 4. Response to Point 3: “Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework” I accept this point in full. The absence of an explicit limitations discussion is a genuine gap, and the revision will add a dedicated passage in the Discussion section addressing: the primarily theoretical rather than empirically tested status of the Blue Degrowth framework; the heterogeneity of Global South contexts and the risks of treating them as a uniform category; political feasibility constraints, particularly in contexts where state capacity is weak or where extractive interests already dominate governance; and the scope conditions under which the five Blue Degrowth principles apply most and least straightforwardly. On the specific suggestion to clarify Global North vs. Global South applicability: I accept this in part. The article’s orientation toward Global South contexts is deliberate and stated — the critique of anti-colonial delinking and ecologically unequal exchange presupposes the structural inequalities that characterise North-South relations in marine value chains. The reviewer is right, however, that this scope should be made more explicit at the framework level rather than assumed from the theoretical framing. A brief clarification in the Blue Degrowth principles section will address this. 5. Response to Point 4: “Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions” I accept the practical dimension of this suggestion. The revision will include a methodological note — in the Methods section and where relevant in the Discussion — that explicitly distinguishes between claims derived from the reviewed literature and claims that represent my normative elaboration of degrowth principles into policy modalities. Signalling language (“the literature suggests,” “I propose,” “the Blue Degrowth framework argues”) will make the distinction clearer to readers. I accept this only in part, however, for a disciplinary reason. Degrowth scholarship is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it holds that research should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology carries a similar commitment. Applying a standard that demands the strict separation of normative from analytical content imports expectations from a different — and within this field, contested — scholarly tradition. The goal is not to suppress the article’s normative commitments but to ensure they are clearly signalled. For me, that is a clarification of register, not a retreat from position. 6. Summary and final thoughts Points 2 and 3 are accepted in full: additional empirical citations and qualifying language will address broad systemic claims, and a dedicated limitations passage will be added to the Discussion. Points 1 and 4 are partly accepted: representative mainstream works will be added as explicit objects of critique without rebalancing the article’s critical orientation, and signalling language will distinguish normative from literature-derived content without suppressing the article’s normative commitments. The revisions ahead — tighter citation support for systemic claims, an explicit limitations discussion, clearer signalling between literature-derived and normative content, and the more visible anchoring of mainstream institutional frameworks as the article’s object of critique — directly address the moderate revisions the reviewer describes and will strengthen the manuscript. A revised manuscript (version 2) will be submitted shortly. Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor qualification and will be addressed in the revision. The one point requiring a more substantive response — broadening engagement with mainstream scholarship — is not a rejection of the concern but a reframing of how that engagement is best understood given the article’s critical purpose. 1. The nature and purpose of this article A brief restatement of the article’s purpose is needed here, as it bears directly on how several of Reviewer 2’s suggestions should be interpreted and acted upon. This article is not a bibliographic survey of ocean governance or blue economy scholarship. It is a critical theoretical intervention: its stated aim is to critically examine and challenge the growth-compatible theoretical commitments of the Blue Economy paradigm — decoupling assumptions, techno-managerial universalism, market-based governance, and spatial fix dynamics — and to propose an alternative normative framework grounded in degrowth and political ecology. The mainstream blue economy literature, including institutional policy frameworks and MSP scholarship, appears in the article — but as the object of critique rather than as a co-equal tradition whose merits are weighed symmetrically. This distinction — between mainstream literature as missing knowledge and mainstream literature as the target of critique — matters for how Point 1 is addressed. It also shapes how Points 3 and 4 should be read, where the article’s normative commitments are not incidental but constitutive of its contribution. With that framing stated, I address each point in turn. 2. Response to Point 1: “Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview” I accept the concern that underlies this point and partially accept its practical recommendation, but I must also contest the implicit standard of comprehensiveness on which it rests. Reviewer 2 suggests that incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. I do not dismiss it, as this is a reasonable disciplinary instinct. However, this article is a critical intervention with a defined analytical purpose, not a balanced survey of the field. The critical Blue Economy literature, degrowth scholarship, and political ecology frameworks are placed at the centre precisely because they constitute the analytical toolkit through which the mainstream paradigm is examined. The article’s critical orientation is not incidental; it is the condition of its contribution. That said, I accept the substance of the reviewer’s concern: if mainstream works are absent rather than visibly engaged, the article becomes vulnerable to the charge of attacking a theoretical straw man rather than the actual literature. Accordingly, in the revision I will add a small number of representative mainstream references — including canonical institutional definitions (World Bank blue economy frameworks, OECD ocean economy reports) and key mainstream blue economy scholarship — cited explicitly as the primary policy and scholarly expressions of the growthism orthodoxy the article deconstructs. Voyer et al.’s (2018) “Shades of Blue” will also be incorporated, as it provides a nuanced mapping of competing blue economy interpretations that usefully anchors the mainstream-to-critical spectrum. These additions will be cited as the targets of the critique rather than as supplementary literature, which satisfies the call for greater comprehensiveness without shifting the article’s analytical position. No further reference additions beyond these and those needed for Point 2 below are anticipated. 3. Response to Point 2: “Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims” I accept this point in full. Several normative or generalised claims — regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance and the characterisation of blue economy initiatives as producing uniform distributional impacts — would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or, where full grounding is not available, clearer acknowledgment of variation and counterexamples. The revision will address this in two ways. They will be added where additional empirical citations can support specific broad claims without distorting them. Where claims describe structural tendencies rather than universal outcomes — a distinction the article intends but does not always make sufficiently clear — explicit qualifying language will be introduced. This point connects directly to the scope clarification Reviewer 1 also raised, and the same revision will address both simultaneously. 4. Response to Point 3: “Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework” I accept this point in full. The absence of an explicit limitations discussion is a genuine gap, and the revision will add a dedicated passage in the Discussion section addressing: the primarily theoretical rather than empirically tested status of the Blue Degrowth framework; the heterogeneity of Global South contexts and the risks of treating them as a uniform category; political feasibility constraints, particularly in contexts where state capacity is weak or where extractive interests already dominate governance; and the scope conditions under which the five Blue Degrowth principles apply most and least straightforwardly. On the specific suggestion to clarify Global North vs. Global South applicability: I accept this in part. The article’s orientation toward Global South contexts is deliberate and stated — the critique of anti-colonial delinking and ecologically unequal exchange presupposes the structural inequalities that characterise North-South relations in marine value chains. The reviewer is right, however, that this scope should be made more explicit at the framework level rather than assumed from the theoretical framing. A brief clarification in the Blue Degrowth principles section will address this. 5. Response to Point 4: “Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions” I accept the practical dimension of this suggestion. The revision will include a methodological note — in the Methods section and where relevant in the Discussion — that explicitly distinguishes between claims derived from the reviewed literature and claims that represent my normative elaboration of degrowth principles into policy modalities. Signalling language (“the literature suggests,” “I propose,” “the Blue Degrowth framework argues”) will make the distinction clearer to readers. I accept this only in part, however, for a disciplinary reason. Degrowth scholarship is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it holds that research should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology carries a similar commitment. Applying a standard that demands the strict separation of normative from analytical content imports expectations from a different — and within this field, contested — scholarly tradition. The goal is not to suppress the article’s normative commitments but to ensure they are clearly signalled. For me, that is a clarification of register, not a retreat from position. 6. Summary and final thoughts Points 2 and 3 are accepted in full: additional empirical citations and qualifying language will address broad systemic claims, and a dedicated limitations passage will be added to the Discussion. Points 1 and 4 are partly accepted: representative mainstream works will be added as explicit objects of critique without rebalancing the article’s critical orientation, and signalling language will distinguish normative from literature-derived content without suppressing the article’s normative commitments. The revisions ahead — tighter citation support for systemic claims, an explicit limitations discussion, clearer signalling between literature-derived and normative content, and the more visible anchoring of mainstream institutional frameworks as the article’s object of critique — directly address the moderate revisions the reviewer describes and will strengthen the manuscript. A revised manuscript (version 2) will be submitted shortly. Competing Interests: I confirm that I have no competing interests to disclose regarding this response. Close Report a concern Respond or Comment COMMENTS ON THIS REPORT Author Response 24 Feb 2026 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere , National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia 24 Feb 2026 Author Response Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor ... Continue reading Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor qualification and will be addressed in the revision. The one point requiring a more substantive response — broadening engagement with mainstream scholarship — is not a rejection of the concern but a reframing of how that engagement is best understood given the article’s critical purpose. 1. The nature and purpose of this article A brief restatement of the article’s purpose is needed here, as it bears directly on how several of Reviewer 2’s suggestions should be interpreted and acted upon. This article is not a bibliographic survey of ocean governance or blue economy scholarship. It is a critical theoretical intervention: its stated aim is to critically examine and challenge the growth-compatible theoretical commitments of the Blue Economy paradigm — decoupling assumptions, techno-managerial universalism, market-based governance, and spatial fix dynamics — and to propose an alternative normative framework grounded in degrowth and political ecology. The mainstream blue economy literature, including institutional policy frameworks and MSP scholarship, appears in the article — but as the object of critique rather than as a co-equal tradition whose merits are weighed symmetrically. This distinction — between mainstream literature as missing knowledge and mainstream literature as the target of critique — matters for how Point 1 is addressed. It also shapes how Points 3 and 4 should be read, where the article’s normative commitments are not incidental but constitutive of its contribution. With that framing stated, I address each point in turn. 2. Response to Point 1: “Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview” I accept the concern that underlies this point and partially accept its practical recommendation, but I must also contest the implicit standard of comprehensiveness on which it rests. Reviewer 2 suggests that incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. I do not dismiss it, as this is a reasonable disciplinary instinct. However, this article is a critical intervention with a defined analytical purpose, not a balanced survey of the field. The critical Blue Economy literature, degrowth scholarship, and political ecology frameworks are placed at the centre precisely because they constitute the analytical toolkit through which the mainstream paradigm is examined. The article’s critical orientation is not incidental; it is the condition of its contribution. That said, I accept the substance of the reviewer’s concern: if mainstream works are absent rather than visibly engaged, the article becomes vulnerable to the charge of attacking a theoretical straw man rather than the actual literature. Accordingly, in the revision I will add a small number of representative mainstream references — including canonical institutional definitions (World Bank blue economy frameworks, OECD ocean economy reports) and key mainstream blue economy scholarship — cited explicitly as the primary policy and scholarly expressions of the growthism orthodoxy the article deconstructs. Voyer et al.’s (2018) “Shades of Blue” will also be incorporated, as it provides a nuanced mapping of competing blue economy interpretations that usefully anchors the mainstream-to-critical spectrum. These additions will be cited as the targets of the critique rather than as supplementary literature, which satisfies the call for greater comprehensiveness without shifting the article’s analytical position. No further reference additions beyond these and those needed for Point 2 below are anticipated. 3. Response to Point 2: “Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims” I accept this point in full. Several normative or generalised claims — regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance and the characterisation of blue economy initiatives as producing uniform distributional impacts — would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or, where full grounding is not available, clearer acknowledgment of variation and counterexamples. The revision will address this in two ways. They will be added where additional empirical citations can support specific broad claims without distorting them. Where claims describe structural tendencies rather than universal outcomes — a distinction the article intends but does not always make sufficiently clear — explicit qualifying language will be introduced. This point connects directly to the scope clarification Reviewer 1 also raised, and the same revision will address both simultaneously. 4. Response to Point 3: “Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework” I accept this point in full. The absence of an explicit limitations discussion is a genuine gap, and the revision will add a dedicated passage in the Discussion section addressing: the primarily theoretical rather than empirically tested status of the Blue Degrowth framework; the heterogeneity of Global South contexts and the risks of treating them as a uniform category; political feasibility constraints, particularly in contexts where state capacity is weak or where extractive interests already dominate governance; and the scope conditions under which the five Blue Degrowth principles apply most and least straightforwardly. On the specific suggestion to clarify Global North vs. Global South applicability: I accept this in part. The article’s orientation toward Global South contexts is deliberate and stated — the critique of anti-colonial delinking and ecologically unequal exchange presupposes the structural inequalities that characterise North-South relations in marine value chains. The reviewer is right, however, that this scope should be made more explicit at the framework level rather than assumed from the theoretical framing. A brief clarification in the Blue Degrowth principles section will address this. 5. Response to Point 4: “Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions” I accept the practical dimension of this suggestion. The revision will include a methodological note — in the Methods section and where relevant in the Discussion — that explicitly distinguishes between claims derived from the reviewed literature and claims that represent my normative elaboration of degrowth principles into policy modalities. Signalling language (“the literature suggests,” “I propose,” “the Blue Degrowth framework argues”) will make the distinction clearer to readers. I accept this only in part, however, for a disciplinary reason. Degrowth scholarship is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it holds that research should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology carries a similar commitment. Applying a standard that demands the strict separation of normative from analytical content imports expectations from a different — and within this field, contested — scholarly tradition. The goal is not to suppress the article’s normative commitments but to ensure they are clearly signalled. For me, that is a clarification of register, not a retreat from position. 6. Summary and final thoughts Points 2 and 3 are accepted in full: additional empirical citations and qualifying language will address broad systemic claims, and a dedicated limitations passage will be added to the Discussion. Points 1 and 4 are partly accepted: representative mainstream works will be added as explicit objects of critique without rebalancing the article’s critical orientation, and signalling language will distinguish normative from literature-derived content without suppressing the article’s normative commitments. The revisions ahead — tighter citation support for systemic claims, an explicit limitations discussion, clearer signalling between literature-derived and normative content, and the more visible anchoring of mainstream institutional frameworks as the article’s object of critique — directly address the moderate revisions the reviewer describes and will strengthen the manuscript. A revised manuscript (version 2) will be submitted shortly. Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor qualification and will be addressed in the revision. The one point requiring a more substantive response — broadening engagement with mainstream scholarship — is not a rejection of the concern but a reframing of how that engagement is best understood given the article’s critical purpose. 1. The nature and purpose of this article A brief restatement of the article’s purpose is needed here, as it bears directly on how several of Reviewer 2’s suggestions should be interpreted and acted upon. This article is not a bibliographic survey of ocean governance or blue economy scholarship. It is a critical theoretical intervention: its stated aim is to critically examine and challenge the growth-compatible theoretical commitments of the Blue Economy paradigm — decoupling assumptions, techno-managerial universalism, market-based governance, and spatial fix dynamics — and to propose an alternative normative framework grounded in degrowth and political ecology. The mainstream blue economy literature, including institutional policy frameworks and MSP scholarship, appears in the article — but as the object of critique rather than as a co-equal tradition whose merits are weighed symmetrically. This distinction — between mainstream literature as missing knowledge and mainstream literature as the target of critique — matters for how Point 1 is addressed. It also shapes how Points 3 and 4 should be read, where the article’s normative commitments are not incidental but constitutive of its contribution. With that framing stated, I address each point in turn. 2. Response to Point 1: “Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview” I accept the concern that underlies this point and partially accept its practical recommendation, but I must also contest the implicit standard of comprehensiveness on which it rests. Reviewer 2 suggests that incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. I do not dismiss it, as this is a reasonable disciplinary instinct. However, this article is a critical intervention with a defined analytical purpose, not a balanced survey of the field. The critical Blue Economy literature, degrowth scholarship, and political ecology frameworks are placed at the centre precisely because they constitute the analytical toolkit through which the mainstream paradigm is examined. The article’s critical orientation is not incidental; it is the condition of its contribution. That said, I accept the substance of the reviewer’s concern: if mainstream works are absent rather than visibly engaged, the article becomes vulnerable to the charge of attacking a theoretical straw man rather than the actual literature. Accordingly, in the revision I will add a small number of representative mainstream references — including canonical institutional definitions (World Bank blue economy frameworks, OECD ocean economy reports) and key mainstream blue economy scholarship — cited explicitly as the primary policy and scholarly expressions of the growthism orthodoxy the article deconstructs. Voyer et al.’s (2018) “Shades of Blue” will also be incorporated, as it provides a nuanced mapping of competing blue economy interpretations that usefully anchors the mainstream-to-critical spectrum. These additions will be cited as the targets of the critique rather than as supplementary literature, which satisfies the call for greater comprehensiveness without shifting the article’s analytical position. No further reference additions beyond these and those needed for Point 2 below are anticipated. 3. Response to Point 2: “Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims” I accept this point in full. Several normative or generalised claims — regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance and the characterisation of blue economy initiatives as producing uniform distributional impacts — would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or, where full grounding is not available, clearer acknowledgment of variation and counterexamples. The revision will address this in two ways. They will be added where additional empirical citations can support specific broad claims without distorting them. Where claims describe structural tendencies rather than universal outcomes — a distinction the article intends but does not always make sufficiently clear — explicit qualifying language will be introduced. This point connects directly to the scope clarification Reviewer 1 also raised, and the same revision will address both simultaneously. 4. Response to Point 3: “Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework” I accept this point in full. The absence of an explicit limitations discussion is a genuine gap, and the revision will add a dedicated passage in the Discussion section addressing: the primarily theoretical rather than empirically tested status of the Blue Degrowth framework; the heterogeneity of Global South contexts and the risks of treating them as a uniform category; political feasibility constraints, particularly in contexts where state capacity is weak or where extractive interests already dominate governance; and the scope conditions under which the five Blue Degrowth principles apply most and least straightforwardly. On the specific suggestion to clarify Global North vs. Global South applicability: I accept this in part. The article’s orientation toward Global South contexts is deliberate and stated — the critique of anti-colonial delinking and ecologically unequal exchange presupposes the structural inequalities that characterise North-South relations in marine value chains. The reviewer is right, however, that this scope should be made more explicit at the framework level rather than assumed from the theoretical framing. A brief clarification in the Blue Degrowth principles section will address this. 5. Response to Point 4: “Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions” I accept the practical dimension of this suggestion. The revision will include a methodological note — in the Methods section and where relevant in the Discussion — that explicitly distinguishes between claims derived from the reviewed literature and claims that represent my normative elaboration of degrowth principles into policy modalities. Signalling language (“the literature suggests,” “I propose,” “the Blue Degrowth framework argues”) will make the distinction clearer to readers. I accept this only in part, however, for a disciplinary reason. Degrowth scholarship is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it holds that research should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology carries a similar commitment. Applying a standard that demands the strict separation of normative from analytical content imports expectations from a different — and within this field, contested — scholarly tradition. The goal is not to suppress the article’s normative commitments but to ensure they are clearly signalled. For me, that is a clarification of register, not a retreat from position. 6. Summary and final thoughts Points 2 and 3 are accepted in full: additional empirical citations and qualifying language will address broad systemic claims, and a dedicated limitations passage will be added to the Discussion. Points 1 and 4 are partly accepted: representative mainstream works will be added as explicit objects of critique without rebalancing the article’s critical orientation, and signalling language will distinguish normative from literature-derived content without suppressing the article’s normative commitments. The revisions ahead — tighter citation support for systemic claims, an explicit limitations discussion, clearer signalling between literature-derived and normative content, and the more visible anchoring of mainstream institutional frameworks as the article’s object of critique — directly address the moderate revisions the reviewer describes and will strengthen the manuscript. A revised manuscript (version 2) will be submitted shortly. Competing Interests: I confirm that I have no competing interests to disclose regarding this response. Close Report a concern COMMENT ON THIS REPORT Views 0 Cite How to cite this report: Alhowaish A. Reviewer Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454320 ) The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-454320 NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. Close Copy Citation Details Reviewer Report 06 Feb 2026 Abdulkarim Alhowaish , Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia Not Approved VIEWS 0 https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454320 Overall Assessment This is a high-quality, theoretically sophisticated review article that makes a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy. Its main strength lies in integrating degrowth and political ecology into a coherent critique and ... Continue reading READ ALL Overall Assessment This is a high-quality, theoretically sophisticated review article that makes a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy. Its main strength lies in integrating degrowth and political ecology into a coherent critique and policy framework, something rarely done so systematically in Blue Economy scholarship. Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness: Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes. Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality. Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments. Points that would substantially strengthen the paper: Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments. The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies. Key concepts are defined carefully, and the argumentative structure is logical and coherent. However: The density of theoretical language (e.g. “techno-managerial universalism,” “spatial fix,” “anti-colonial delinking”) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers. Some long paragraphs, especially in the Results and Discussion sections, could be improved through subheadings or signposting sentences. Required for scientific soundness: No—this is primarily a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue. Recommended improvement : Add short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts to broaden accessibility without diluting rigor. Citations In addition to the sources already cited in the manuscript, the following recent studies should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison: Reference 1 Reference 2 Final Recommendation Major Revision The article is theoretically strong and indexable, but requires targeted revisions to clarify scope, positioning, and accessibility before it can be considered scientifically and editorially complete. Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Yes Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes Is the review written in accessible language? Partly Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Yes References 1. Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science . 2026; 13 . Publisher Full Text 2. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability . 2025; 17 (19). Publisher Full Text Competing Interests: No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise: Economic Development, Blue Economy and Circular Economic Development, Sustainability and Sustainable Development, Local Economic Development and City Economies I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to state that I do not consider it to be of an acceptable scientific standard, for reasons outlined above. Close READ LESS CITE CITE HOW TO CITE THIS REPORT Alhowaish A. Reviewer Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454320 ) The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-454320 NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in all citations of this article. COPY CITATION DETAILS Report a concern Author Response 19 Feb 2026 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere , National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia 19 Feb 2026 Author Response Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural ... Continue reading Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural accessibility — are substantive and have been taken seriously. I have incorporated them accordingly. What cannot pass without comment, however, is a set of internal contradictions that sit at the heart of the review and that, taken together, undermine the coherence of its formal recommendation. A further concern, relating to citation practice, touches on questions of editorial integrity that I regard as too significant to leave unaddressed. Both matters are raised below with the transparency that F1000Research’s open review model both requires and invites. The responses will proceed point by point, as follow. I. Response to “Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness” Reviewer 1 identifies three points under this heading. I accept all three in principle and address each below. 1.1. “Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes.” I accept this suggestion. The article’s critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing, decoupling assumptions, market instruments, spatial fix dynamics, distributional outcomes, and techno-optimism are intended to describe dominant, structurally prevalent tendencies within Blue Economy governance paradigms — not to assert that every instantiation of the Blue Economy in every context produces these outcomes uniformly. The revised version will include explicit qualifying language at the opening of the Results section and at key argumentative junctures to make this distinction clear: that the causal mechanisms identified represent observable tendencies documented in the literature rather than universal, exceptionless laws. This clarification in no way weakens the article’s core arguments; it sharpens their analytical precision. 1.2. “Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with ‘just’ or ‘inclusive’ Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality.” I accept this suggestion as substantively useful. There is indeed a body of reformist literature — variously labelled “just Blue Economy,” “inclusive Blue Economy,” or “Blue Justice” — that attempts to correct distributive failures within a growth-compatible paradigm rather than departing from it. Engaging with this literature will allow the article to position Blue Degrowth more precisely: not simply as a critique of the Blue Economy in its mainstream formulation, but as a framework that also departs from reformist alternatives that leave the growth premise intact. A brief but substantive paragraph engaging with this literature will be added to the Literature Review section. I note, however, that this is not a gap that undermines the article’s existing findings; it is an enhancement to positioning and originality that the article’s theoretical architecture already implicitly supports. 1.3. “Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments.” I accept this suggestion in part. Distinguishing analytical claims from normative commitments is a legitimate goal in any scholarly article, and I will review the manuscript to ensure that passages making empirical or theoretical claims are not inadvertently written in a register that blurs them with advocacy. However, I must also note an important disciplinary context that Reviewer 1’s framing does not appear to account for. Degrowth scholarship — the primary theoretical tradition from which this article draws — is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) all explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it insists that research cannot and should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology, the complementary framework deployed in this article, is similarly explicit about the value-ladenness of research on resource governance and dispossession. Applying a positivist demand for the strict separation of analytical and normative claims to a degrowth political ecology article reflects a methodological standard that is external to — and in tension with — the epistemological conventions of the field this article operates within. I will sharpen the prose where genuine ambiguity exists, but will not flatten the article’s normative commitments, which are constitutive of its intellectual contribution rather than incidental to it. II. Response to “Points that would substantially strengthen the paper” 2.1. “Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes.” I accept this suggestion enthusiastically. A conceptual diagram mapping the causal chain from Blue Economy policy instruments (e.g., public-private partnerships, certification schemes, blue bonds, concessions) through intermediate mechanisms (commodification, enclosure, spatial fix, value chain capture) to distributional outcomes (dispossession, ecological burden transfer, local value loss) would serve both analytical and communicative functions. It would also address the reviewer’s broader concern about accessibility, as visual presentation of the causal architecture can make the argument legible to readers who are less familiar with the theoretical vocabulary. I will include such a figure in the revised manuscript. 2.2. “Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments.” I accept this suggestion in principle. The addition of sub-headings or signposting sentences in the longer paragraphs of the Results and Discussion sections is a reasonable structural improvement and will be implemented in the revision. These adjustments will enhance readability without diluting the article’s theoretical rigour or specialist register. I have also taken note of Reviewer 1’s specific suggestion to add “short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts.” Select key terms — particularly those that may be less familiar to readers approaching from adjacent disciplines — will be briefly glossed at their first occurrence. I consider this a proportionate and constructive response. III. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘accessibility observation’ and its role in the ‘Final Recommendation’ This is where I must register a substantive objection. Reviewer 1 writes: “The density of theoretical language (e.g., ‘techno-managerial universalism,’ ‘spatial fix,’ ‘anti-colonial delinking’) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers.” I do not dismiss this observation in isolation. Accessibility is a genuine consideration for any author wishing to broaden the reach of their work. The suggested mitigation — glossing key terms — has been accepted above. However, I must draw attention to a significant internal contradiction in Reviewer 1’s own review. In the sentence immediately preceding the accessibility concern, Reviewer 1 states: “The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies.” These two statements are in direct logical tension. An article that is explicitly acknowledged as “clearly written for a specialist academic audience” cannot simultaneously be faulted for failing to be accessible to policy practitioners and interdisciplinary generalists. The accessibility concern might carry weight if the article aspired to a general readership — but it does not, and Reviewer 1 acknowledges this. Furthermore, Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises the accessibility concern explicitly as “a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue.” In the reviewer’s own framing, this concern falls outside the category of problems bearing on scientific soundness. Its elevation into the principal driver of a “Major Revision” recommendation is therefore difficult to reconcile — not with my own assessment, but with Reviewer 1’s own characterisation of the issue. IV. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Final Recommendation’ and its internal contradictions I respectfully but directly contest the “Major Revision” final recommendation as inconsistent with the body of Reviewer 1’s own review. Reviewer 1’s four evaluation questions produce the following answers: Is the topic discussed comprehensively in the context of current literature? Yes. Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes. Is the review written in accessible language? Partly. Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of current research literature? Yes. Three unambiguous “Yes” responses and one “Partly” — with the “Partly” concerning language accessibility, which Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises as a readability concern rather than a validity concern — constitute an evaluation profile that maps to a minor or, at most, moderate revision. By no reasonable reading of these answers does a “Major Revision” recommendation follow. A “Major Revision” in F1000Research’s framework implies that fundamental flaws seriously undermine the findings and conclusions. Reviewer 1’s own evaluation instrument records no such finding. I also note that Reviewer 1’s opening overall assessment calls the article “high-quality, theoretically sophisticated,” “a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy,” and “theoretically strong and indexable.” These are not the characterisations one would associate with an article requiring major revision on grounds of scientific soundness. I do not raise these points to be combative, but because transparent and consistent peer review is a cornerstone of scholarly integrity. The mismatch between the review’s body and its formal recommendation should be noted for the editorial record. V. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Citation’ recommendations Reviewer 1 recommends the inclusion of two references: Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science. 2026; 13. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability. 2025; 17 (19). Both articles are sole-authored by Reviewer 1. I would like to raise a procedural concern before addressing the scholarly substance. V.1. On the citation recommendation as a matter of editorial practice Recommending one’s own sole-authored publications for inclusion in the work under review is a recognised conflict of interest in academic peer review. This concern is heightened in F1000Research’s open peer review model, where reviewers are not anonymised: I can see precisely whose work is being recommended, making the coercive potential of such recommendations more pronounced than in double-blind review. The phrasing Reviewer 1 employs — that these works “should be included” — is directive rather than advisory, amplifying this concern further. I respectfully invite the handling editor to determine whether this practice is consistent with F1000Research’s reviewer guidelines and conflict of interest policies. I raise this not to impugn Reviewer 1’s broader scholarly contribution, but because the integrity of the peer review process depends on reviewers maintaining clear boundaries between scholarly evaluation and self-promotion. This is a matter of procedural principle. V.2. On the scholarly substance of the recommended citations Setting aside the procedural concern, I have carefully read both of Reviewer 1’s articles against the content of my own manuscript. My assessment is that Reviewer 1’s confidence that these papers ‘should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison’ is substantially overstated. Below I explain why, and then identify the narrow set of passages where a legitimate, if modest, connection can be made. My article’s theoretical take and its empirical illustration are oriented toward the Global South — specifically toward communities in developing economies (Indonesia and by extension comparable coastal contexts in the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and small island states) where dispossession, colonial legacies, and value chain subordination are structurally operative. The Indonesian vignette that grounds the theoretical argument reflects this orientation. The Arabian Gulf, the locus of Reviewer 1’s articles, is an analytically distinct context: the GCC states are high-income rentier economies pursuing diversification under national strategies such as Vision 2030 whose Blue Economy challenges are principally about institutional governance, modernisation, and moving beyond hydrocarbon dependence. That is evidently far from anti-colonial delinking, accumulation by dispossession, or ecologically unequal exchange in the postcolonial sense my present article theorises. The methodological distance compounds this. Neither of Reviewer 1’s articles engages with degrowth theory, political ecology in the Marxist or post-structuralist tradition, ecologically unequal exchange, customary marine tenure, commons governance in the Ostrom sense, or any of the critical frameworks that constitute the conceptual foundation of my article. The Frontiers in Marine Science paper is an empirical stakeholder survey of Blue Economy perceptions in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, conducted using structured questionnaires and inferential statistics. The Sustainability paper is a bibliometric mapping of GCC Blue Economy scholarship using Scopus data. Both are methodologically and theoretically alien to the thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping deployed here. Citing Saudi Arabia/Eastern Province stakeholder perceptions as comparative evidence for my degrowth framework would also require explicit and substantial theoretical bridging work that neither of Reviewer 1’s papers provides. That said, in the interest of scientific rigour and in good faith, I have examined whether specific passages in Reviewer 1’s papers could warrant citation in carefully qualified terms. The findings are as follows. From the Frontiers in Marine Science paper, three passages carry limited but genuine relevance. First, the paper documents that community respondents expressed significantly more caution toward aquaculture expansion than government and academic respondents, citing ecological and livelihood concerns. That local coastal communities resist Blue Economy expansion on grounds of ecological disruption and livelihood security resonates, modestly, with the present article’s argument that Blue Economy narratives marginalise non-market values and displace local provisioning logics — though the GCC context would need to be framed explicitly as a non-Global South contrast. Second, the paper finds that national Blue Economy policy discourse, driven by Vision 2030, has outpaced community readiness and local institutional development — a top-down diffusion dynamic that bears limited but genuine resemblance to the present article’s critique of techno-managerial universalism as imposing universal templates without accounting for local institutional heterogeneity. Third, the paper documents fragmented financing, limited access to private investment, and inadequate government funding as structural constraints. These could serve, in a carefully framed passage, as evidence that even relatively resource-rich governance contexts struggle with institutional coherence — though the structural roots of GCC constraints and Global South constraints differ markedly, and conflating the two would weaken rather than strengthen the argument. From the Sustainability paper, two findings carry partial relevance. The bibliometric analysis explicitly identifies traditional ecological knowledge — “such as artisanal fishing practices and indigenous stewardship” — as largely neglected in favour of high-tech, industrialised approaches in GCC Blue Economy research, which directly parallels the present article’s critique of techno-optimism and the erasure of place-based knowledge systems. The analysis also identifies equity and justice as underrepresented research clusters in GCC Blue Economy scholarship, corroborating the broader argument that mainstream Blue Economy discourse consistently deprioritises distributional questions — though the GCC bibliometric gap reflects a different political economy from the distributional injustices theorised in the present article’s Global South contexts. What Reviewer 1’s papers do not address, and cannot be made to address, is equally significant. Neither paper contains content relevant to decoupling and its critiques, spatial fix theory or accumulation by dispossession, ecologically unequal exchange, commons governance or customary marine tenure, degrowth theory in any form, anti-colonial framing, or value chain subordination in Global South fisheries. There is no meaningful empirical grounding they provide for the present article’s core theoretical claims. Treating them as substantive empirical anchors for the framework would misrepresent what these papers actually demonstrate — and Reviewer 1’s confident directive that they “should be included” is not matched by the scholarly content of the papers themselves. Given the procedural concern raised in V.1 and the limited scholarly fit assessed in V.2, I cannot accept the citation recommendation as stated. If the handling editor determines that no procedural violation has occurred, I may consider incorporating a brief, appropriately qualified reference to the thematic overlaps identified above, while making clear their contextual limitations. VI. Summary of Revisions Accepted and Contested For transparency, I summarise the disposition of each point raised by Reviewer 1: Accepted and to be implemented: Clarify scope: add explicit qualifying language distinguishing dominant patterns from universal outcomes. (Accepted) Brief engagement with reformist “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks. (Accepted) Review and sharpen the distinction between analytical and normative claims where genuine prose ambiguity exists, while preserving the article’s normative commitments as epistemologically appropriate to degrowth political ecology. (Partially accepted) Add a schematic figure illustrating causal mechanisms from Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. (Accepted) Add sub-headings or signposting sentences in longer Results and Discussion paragraphs. (Accepted) Add brief glosses for core theoretical terms at first occurrence. (Accepted) Contested: The characterisation of accessibility to policy practitioners and generalist readers as grounds for “Major Revision,” given Reviewer 1’s own prior acknowledgement that the article is “clearly written for a specialist academic audience.” (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The “Major Revision” final recommendation, as inconsistent with the body of the review and the answers to Reviewer 1’s own evaluation checklist. (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The citation recommendation for Reviewer 1’s own sole-authored publications, on both procedural (conflict of interest) and scholarly (insufficient thematic and methodological fit) grounds. (Contested) VII. Concluding Reflections Reviewer 1’s review contains valuable input that I have engaged with carefully and integrated their suggestions where they genuinely serve the work. The revisions ahead — a causal mechanism figure, engagement with reformist Blue Economy frameworks, scope qualification, and structural improvements to the longer passages — will sharpen the manuscript in ways that genuinely strengthen its contribution. These are worthwhile interventions, and I am grateful for them. My responses to the more contested points are offered not out of defensiveness, but out of a belief that peer review thrives and functions best on honest, transparent dialogue. I believe it is important to highlight the tension between the review’s substantive assessments and its formal recommendations, as well as the logical inconsistency in the accessibility objection, and the citation practice that sits in tension with standard conflict of interest norms. These points merit the editorial team’s consideration alongside my response, as they impact the scholarly integrity of the process. I look forward to submitting a revised manuscript that incorporates these improvements and reflects a more robust final product. Sincerely, Muhammad B. S. Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural accessibility — are substantive and have been taken seriously. I have incorporated them accordingly. What cannot pass without comment, however, is a set of internal contradictions that sit at the heart of the review and that, taken together, undermine the coherence of its formal recommendation. A further concern, relating to citation practice, touches on questions of editorial integrity that I regard as too significant to leave unaddressed. Both matters are raised below with the transparency that F1000Research’s open review model both requires and invites. The responses will proceed point by point, as follow. I. Response to “Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness” Reviewer 1 identifies three points under this heading. I accept all three in principle and address each below. 1.1. “Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes.” I accept this suggestion. The article’s critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing, decoupling assumptions, market instruments, spatial fix dynamics, distributional outcomes, and techno-optimism are intended to describe dominant, structurally prevalent tendencies within Blue Economy governance paradigms — not to assert that every instantiation of the Blue Economy in every context produces these outcomes uniformly. The revised version will include explicit qualifying language at the opening of the Results section and at key argumentative junctures to make this distinction clear: that the causal mechanisms identified represent observable tendencies documented in the literature rather than universal, exceptionless laws. This clarification in no way weakens the article’s core arguments; it sharpens their analytical precision. 1.2. “Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with ‘just’ or ‘inclusive’ Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality.” I accept this suggestion as substantively useful. There is indeed a body of reformist literature — variously labelled “just Blue Economy,” “inclusive Blue Economy,” or “Blue Justice” — that attempts to correct distributive failures within a growth-compatible paradigm rather than departing from it. Engaging with this literature will allow the article to position Blue Degrowth more precisely: not simply as a critique of the Blue Economy in its mainstream formulation, but as a framework that also departs from reformist alternatives that leave the growth premise intact. A brief but substantive paragraph engaging with this literature will be added to the Literature Review section. I note, however, that this is not a gap that undermines the article’s existing findings; it is an enhancement to positioning and originality that the article’s theoretical architecture already implicitly supports. 1.3. “Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments.” I accept this suggestion in part. Distinguishing analytical claims from normative commitments is a legitimate goal in any scholarly article, and I will review the manuscript to ensure that passages making empirical or theoretical claims are not inadvertently written in a register that blurs them with advocacy. However, I must also note an important disciplinary context that Reviewer 1’s framing does not appear to account for. Degrowth scholarship — the primary theoretical tradition from which this article draws — is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) all explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it insists that research cannot and should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology, the complementary framework deployed in this article, is similarly explicit about the value-ladenness of research on resource governance and dispossession. Applying a positivist demand for the strict separation of analytical and normative claims to a degrowth political ecology article reflects a methodological standard that is external to — and in tension with — the epistemological conventions of the field this article operates within. I will sharpen the prose where genuine ambiguity exists, but will not flatten the article’s normative commitments, which are constitutive of its intellectual contribution rather than incidental to it. II. Response to “Points that would substantially strengthen the paper” 2.1. “Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes.” I accept this suggestion enthusiastically. A conceptual diagram mapping the causal chain from Blue Economy policy instruments (e.g., public-private partnerships, certification schemes, blue bonds, concessions) through intermediate mechanisms (commodification, enclosure, spatial fix, value chain capture) to distributional outcomes (dispossession, ecological burden transfer, local value loss) would serve both analytical and communicative functions. It would also address the reviewer’s broader concern about accessibility, as visual presentation of the causal architecture can make the argument legible to readers who are less familiar with the theoretical vocabulary. I will include such a figure in the revised manuscript. 2.2. “Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments.” I accept this suggestion in principle. The addition of sub-headings or signposting sentences in the longer paragraphs of the Results and Discussion sections is a reasonable structural improvement and will be implemented in the revision. These adjustments will enhance readability without diluting the article’s theoretical rigour or specialist register. I have also taken note of Reviewer 1’s specific suggestion to add “short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts.” Select key terms — particularly those that may be less familiar to readers approaching from adjacent disciplines — will be briefly glossed at their first occurrence. I consider this a proportionate and constructive response. III. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘accessibility observation’ and its role in the ‘Final Recommendation’ This is where I must register a substantive objection. Reviewer 1 writes: “The density of theoretical language (e.g., ‘techno-managerial universalism,’ ‘spatial fix,’ ‘anti-colonial delinking’) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers.” I do not dismiss this observation in isolation. Accessibility is a genuine consideration for any author wishing to broaden the reach of their work. The suggested mitigation — glossing key terms — has been accepted above. However, I must draw attention to a significant internal contradiction in Reviewer 1’s own review. In the sentence immediately preceding the accessibility concern, Reviewer 1 states: “The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies.” These two statements are in direct logical tension. An article that is explicitly acknowledged as “clearly written for a specialist academic audience” cannot simultaneously be faulted for failing to be accessible to policy practitioners and interdisciplinary generalists. The accessibility concern might carry weight if the article aspired to a general readership — but it does not, and Reviewer 1 acknowledges this. Furthermore, Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises the accessibility concern explicitly as “a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue.” In the reviewer’s own framing, this concern falls outside the category of problems bearing on scientific soundness. Its elevation into the principal driver of a “Major Revision” recommendation is therefore difficult to reconcile — not with my own assessment, but with Reviewer 1’s own characterisation of the issue. IV. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Final Recommendation’ and its internal contradictions I respectfully but directly contest the “Major Revision” final recommendation as inconsistent with the body of Reviewer 1’s own review. Reviewer 1’s four evaluation questions produce the following answers: Is the topic discussed comprehensively in the context of current literature? Yes. Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes. Is the review written in accessible language? Partly. Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of current research literature? Yes. Three unambiguous “Yes” responses and one “Partly” — with the “Partly” concerning language accessibility, which Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises as a readability concern rather than a validity concern — constitute an evaluation profile that maps to a minor or, at most, moderate revision. By no reasonable reading of these answers does a “Major Revision” recommendation follow. A “Major Revision” in F1000Research’s framework implies that fundamental flaws seriously undermine the findings and conclusions. Reviewer 1’s own evaluation instrument records no such finding. I also note that Reviewer 1’s opening overall assessment calls the article “high-quality, theoretically sophisticated,” “a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy,” and “theoretically strong and indexable.” These are not the characterisations one would associate with an article requiring major revision on grounds of scientific soundness. I do not raise these points to be combative, but because transparent and consistent peer review is a cornerstone of scholarly integrity. The mismatch between the review’s body and its formal recommendation should be noted for the editorial record. V. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Citation’ recommendations Reviewer 1 recommends the inclusion of two references: Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science. 2026; 13. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability. 2025; 17 (19). Both articles are sole-authored by Reviewer 1. I would like to raise a procedural concern before addressing the scholarly substance. V.1. On the citation recommendation as a matter of editorial practice Recommending one’s own sole-authored publications for inclusion in the work under review is a recognised conflict of interest in academic peer review. This concern is heightened in F1000Research’s open peer review model, where reviewers are not anonymised: I can see precisely whose work is being recommended, making the coercive potential of such recommendations more pronounced than in double-blind review. The phrasing Reviewer 1 employs — that these works “should be included” — is directive rather than advisory, amplifying this concern further. I respectfully invite the handling editor to determine whether this practice is consistent with F1000Research’s reviewer guidelines and conflict of interest policies. I raise this not to impugn Reviewer 1’s broader scholarly contribution, but because the integrity of the peer review process depends on reviewers maintaining clear boundaries between scholarly evaluation and self-promotion. This is a matter of procedural principle. V.2. On the scholarly substance of the recommended citations Setting aside the procedural concern, I have carefully read both of Reviewer 1’s articles against the content of my own manuscript. My assessment is that Reviewer 1’s confidence that these papers ‘should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison’ is substantially overstated. Below I explain why, and then identify the narrow set of passages where a legitimate, if modest, connection can be made. My article’s theoretical take and its empirical illustration are oriented toward the Global South — specifically toward communities in developing economies (Indonesia and by extension comparable coastal contexts in the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and small island states) where dispossession, colonial legacies, and value chain subordination are structurally operative. The Indonesian vignette that grounds the theoretical argument reflects this orientation. The Arabian Gulf, the locus of Reviewer 1’s articles, is an analytically distinct context: the GCC states are high-income rentier economies pursuing diversification under national strategies such as Vision 2030 whose Blue Economy challenges are principally about institutional governance, modernisation, and moving beyond hydrocarbon dependence. That is evidently far from anti-colonial delinking, accumulation by dispossession, or ecologically unequal exchange in the postcolonial sense my present article theorises. The methodological distance compounds this. Neither of Reviewer 1’s articles engages with degrowth theory, political ecology in the Marxist or post-structuralist tradition, ecologically unequal exchange, customary marine tenure, commons governance in the Ostrom sense, or any of the critical frameworks that constitute the conceptual foundation of my article. The Frontiers in Marine Science paper is an empirical stakeholder survey of Blue Economy perceptions in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, conducted using structured questionnaires and inferential statistics. The Sustainability paper is a bibliometric mapping of GCC Blue Economy scholarship using Scopus data. Both are methodologically and theoretically alien to the thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping deployed here. Citing Saudi Arabia/Eastern Province stakeholder perceptions as comparative evidence for my degrowth framework would also require explicit and substantial theoretical bridging work that neither of Reviewer 1’s papers provides. That said, in the interest of scientific rigour and in good faith, I have examined whether specific passages in Reviewer 1’s papers could warrant citation in carefully qualified terms. The findings are as follows. From the Frontiers in Marine Science paper, three passages carry limited but genuine relevance. First, the paper documents that community respondents expressed significantly more caution toward aquaculture expansion than government and academic respondents, citing ecological and livelihood concerns. That local coastal communities resist Blue Economy expansion on grounds of ecological disruption and livelihood security resonates, modestly, with the present article’s argument that Blue Economy narratives marginalise non-market values and displace local provisioning logics — though the GCC context would need to be framed explicitly as a non-Global South contrast. Second, the paper finds that national Blue Economy policy discourse, driven by Vision 2030, has outpaced community readiness and local institutional development — a top-down diffusion dynamic that bears limited but genuine resemblance to the present article’s critique of techno-managerial universalism as imposing universal templates without accounting for local institutional heterogeneity. Third, the paper documents fragmented financing, limited access to private investment, and inadequate government funding as structural constraints. These could serve, in a carefully framed passage, as evidence that even relatively resource-rich governance contexts struggle with institutional coherence — though the structural roots of GCC constraints and Global South constraints differ markedly, and conflating the two would weaken rather than strengthen the argument. From the Sustainability paper, two findings carry partial relevance. The bibliometric analysis explicitly identifies traditional ecological knowledge — “such as artisanal fishing practices and indigenous stewardship” — as largely neglected in favour of high-tech, industrialised approaches in GCC Blue Economy research, which directly parallels the present article’s critique of techno-optimism and the erasure of place-based knowledge systems. The analysis also identifies equity and justice as underrepresented research clusters in GCC Blue Economy scholarship, corroborating the broader argument that mainstream Blue Economy discourse consistently deprioritises distributional questions — though the GCC bibliometric gap reflects a different political economy from the distributional injustices theorised in the present article’s Global South contexts. What Reviewer 1’s papers do not address, and cannot be made to address, is equally significant. Neither paper contains content relevant to decoupling and its critiques, spatial fix theory or accumulation by dispossession, ecologically unequal exchange, commons governance or customary marine tenure, degrowth theory in any form, anti-colonial framing, or value chain subordination in Global South fisheries. There is no meaningful empirical grounding they provide for the present article’s core theoretical claims. Treating them as substantive empirical anchors for the framework would misrepresent what these papers actually demonstrate — and Reviewer 1’s confident directive that they “should be included” is not matched by the scholarly content of the papers themselves. Given the procedural concern raised in V.1 and the limited scholarly fit assessed in V.2, I cannot accept the citation recommendation as stated. If the handling editor determines that no procedural violation has occurred, I may consider incorporating a brief, appropriately qualified reference to the thematic overlaps identified above, while making clear their contextual limitations. VI. Summary of Revisions Accepted and Contested For transparency, I summarise the disposition of each point raised by Reviewer 1: Accepted and to be implemented: Clarify scope: add explicit qualifying language distinguishing dominant patterns from universal outcomes. (Accepted) Brief engagement with reformist “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks. (Accepted) Review and sharpen the distinction between analytical and normative claims where genuine prose ambiguity exists, while preserving the article’s normative commitments as epistemologically appropriate to degrowth political ecology. (Partially accepted) Add a schematic figure illustrating causal mechanisms from Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. (Accepted) Add sub-headings or signposting sentences in longer Results and Discussion paragraphs. (Accepted) Add brief glosses for core theoretical terms at first occurrence. (Accepted) Contested: The characterisation of accessibility to policy practitioners and generalist readers as grounds for “Major Revision,” given Reviewer 1’s own prior acknowledgement that the article is “clearly written for a specialist academic audience.” (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The “Major Revision” final recommendation, as inconsistent with the body of the review and the answers to Reviewer 1’s own evaluation checklist. (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The citation recommendation for Reviewer 1’s own sole-authored publications, on both procedural (conflict of interest) and scholarly (insufficient thematic and methodological fit) grounds. (Contested) VII. Concluding Reflections Reviewer 1’s review contains valuable input that I have engaged with carefully and integrated their suggestions where they genuinely serve the work. The revisions ahead — a causal mechanism figure, engagement with reformist Blue Economy frameworks, scope qualification, and structural improvements to the longer passages — will sharpen the manuscript in ways that genuinely strengthen its contribution. These are worthwhile interventions, and I am grateful for them. My responses to the more contested points are offered not out of defensiveness, but out of a belief that peer review thrives and functions best on honest, transparent dialogue. I believe it is important to highlight the tension between the review’s substantive assessments and its formal recommendations, as well as the logical inconsistency in the accessibility objection, and the citation practice that sits in tension with standard conflict of interest norms. These points merit the editorial team’s consideration alongside my response, as they impact the scholarly integrity of the process. I look forward to submitting a revised manuscript that incorporates these improvements and reflects a more robust final product. Sincerely, Muhammad B. S. Competing Interests: I confirm that I have no competing interests to disclose regarding this response. Close Report a concern Respond or Comment COMMENTS ON THIS REPORT Author Response 19 Feb 2026 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere , National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia 19 Feb 2026 Author Response Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural ... Continue reading Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural accessibility — are substantive and have been taken seriously. I have incorporated them accordingly. What cannot pass without comment, however, is a set of internal contradictions that sit at the heart of the review and that, taken together, undermine the coherence of its formal recommendation. A further concern, relating to citation practice, touches on questions of editorial integrity that I regard as too significant to leave unaddressed. Both matters are raised below with the transparency that F1000Research’s open review model both requires and invites. The responses will proceed point by point, as follow. I. Response to “Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness” Reviewer 1 identifies three points under this heading. I accept all three in principle and address each below. 1.1. “Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes.” I accept this suggestion. The article’s critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing, decoupling assumptions, market instruments, spatial fix dynamics, distributional outcomes, and techno-optimism are intended to describe dominant, structurally prevalent tendencies within Blue Economy governance paradigms — not to assert that every instantiation of the Blue Economy in every context produces these outcomes uniformly. The revised version will include explicit qualifying language at the opening of the Results section and at key argumentative junctures to make this distinction clear: that the causal mechanisms identified represent observable tendencies documented in the literature rather than universal, exceptionless laws. This clarification in no way weakens the article’s core arguments; it sharpens their analytical precision. 1.2. “Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with ‘just’ or ‘inclusive’ Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality.” I accept this suggestion as substantively useful. There is indeed a body of reformist literature — variously labelled “just Blue Economy,” “inclusive Blue Economy,” or “Blue Justice” — that attempts to correct distributive failures within a growth-compatible paradigm rather than departing from it. Engaging with this literature will allow the article to position Blue Degrowth more precisely: not simply as a critique of the Blue Economy in its mainstream formulation, but as a framework that also departs from reformist alternatives that leave the growth premise intact. A brief but substantive paragraph engaging with this literature will be added to the Literature Review section. I note, however, that this is not a gap that undermines the article’s existing findings; it is an enhancement to positioning and originality that the article’s theoretical architecture already implicitly supports. 1.3. “Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments.” I accept this suggestion in part. Distinguishing analytical claims from normative commitments is a legitimate goal in any scholarly article, and I will review the manuscript to ensure that passages making empirical or theoretical claims are not inadvertently written in a register that blurs them with advocacy. However, I must also note an important disciplinary context that Reviewer 1’s framing does not appear to account for. Degrowth scholarship — the primary theoretical tradition from which this article draws — is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) all explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it insists that research cannot and should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology, the complementary framework deployed in this article, is similarly explicit about the value-ladenness of research on resource governance and dispossession. Applying a positivist demand for the strict separation of analytical and normative claims to a degrowth political ecology article reflects a methodological standard that is external to — and in tension with — the epistemological conventions of the field this article operates within. I will sharpen the prose where genuine ambiguity exists, but will not flatten the article’s normative commitments, which are constitutive of its intellectual contribution rather than incidental to it. II. Response to “Points that would substantially strengthen the paper” 2.1. “Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes.” I accept this suggestion enthusiastically. A conceptual diagram mapping the causal chain from Blue Economy policy instruments (e.g., public-private partnerships, certification schemes, blue bonds, concessions) through intermediate mechanisms (commodification, enclosure, spatial fix, value chain capture) to distributional outcomes (dispossession, ecological burden transfer, local value loss) would serve both analytical and communicative functions. It would also address the reviewer’s broader concern about accessibility, as visual presentation of the causal architecture can make the argument legible to readers who are less familiar with the theoretical vocabulary. I will include such a figure in the revised manuscript. 2.2. “Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments.” I accept this suggestion in principle. The addition of sub-headings or signposting sentences in the longer paragraphs of the Results and Discussion sections is a reasonable structural improvement and will be implemented in the revision. These adjustments will enhance readability without diluting the article’s theoretical rigour or specialist register. I have also taken note of Reviewer 1’s specific suggestion to add “short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts.” Select key terms — particularly those that may be less familiar to readers approaching from adjacent disciplines — will be briefly glossed at their first occurrence. I consider this a proportionate and constructive response. III. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘accessibility observation’ and its role in the ‘Final Recommendation’ This is where I must register a substantive objection. Reviewer 1 writes: “The density of theoretical language (e.g., ‘techno-managerial universalism,’ ‘spatial fix,’ ‘anti-colonial delinking’) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers.” I do not dismiss this observation in isolation. Accessibility is a genuine consideration for any author wishing to broaden the reach of their work. The suggested mitigation — glossing key terms — has been accepted above. However, I must draw attention to a significant internal contradiction in Reviewer 1’s own review. In the sentence immediately preceding the accessibility concern, Reviewer 1 states: “The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies.” These two statements are in direct logical tension. An article that is explicitly acknowledged as “clearly written for a specialist academic audience” cannot simultaneously be faulted for failing to be accessible to policy practitioners and interdisciplinary generalists. The accessibility concern might carry weight if the article aspired to a general readership — but it does not, and Reviewer 1 acknowledges this. Furthermore, Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises the accessibility concern explicitly as “a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue.” In the reviewer’s own framing, this concern falls outside the category of problems bearing on scientific soundness. Its elevation into the principal driver of a “Major Revision” recommendation is therefore difficult to reconcile — not with my own assessment, but with Reviewer 1’s own characterisation of the issue. IV. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Final Recommendation’ and its internal contradictions I respectfully but directly contest the “Major Revision” final recommendation as inconsistent with the body of Reviewer 1’s own review. Reviewer 1’s four evaluation questions produce the following answers: Is the topic discussed comprehensively in the context of current literature? Yes. Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes. Is the review written in accessible language? Partly. Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of current research literature? Yes. Three unambiguous “Yes” responses and one “Partly” — with the “Partly” concerning language accessibility, which Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises as a readability concern rather than a validity concern — constitute an evaluation profile that maps to a minor or, at most, moderate revision. By no reasonable reading of these answers does a “Major Revision” recommendation follow. A “Major Revision” in F1000Research’s framework implies that fundamental flaws seriously undermine the findings and conclusions. Reviewer 1’s own evaluation instrument records no such finding. I also note that Reviewer 1’s opening overall assessment calls the article “high-quality, theoretically sophisticated,” “a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy,” and “theoretically strong and indexable.” These are not the characterisations one would associate with an article requiring major revision on grounds of scientific soundness. I do not raise these points to be combative, but because transparent and consistent peer review is a cornerstone of scholarly integrity. The mismatch between the review’s body and its formal recommendation should be noted for the editorial record. V. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Citation’ recommendations Reviewer 1 recommends the inclusion of two references: Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science. 2026; 13. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability. 2025; 17 (19). Both articles are sole-authored by Reviewer 1. I would like to raise a procedural concern before addressing the scholarly substance. V.1. On the citation recommendation as a matter of editorial practice Recommending one’s own sole-authored publications for inclusion in the work under review is a recognised conflict of interest in academic peer review. This concern is heightened in F1000Research’s open peer review model, where reviewers are not anonymised: I can see precisely whose work is being recommended, making the coercive potential of such recommendations more pronounced than in double-blind review. The phrasing Reviewer 1 employs — that these works “should be included” — is directive rather than advisory, amplifying this concern further. I respectfully invite the handling editor to determine whether this practice is consistent with F1000Research’s reviewer guidelines and conflict of interest policies. I raise this not to impugn Reviewer 1’s broader scholarly contribution, but because the integrity of the peer review process depends on reviewers maintaining clear boundaries between scholarly evaluation and self-promotion. This is a matter of procedural principle. V.2. On the scholarly substance of the recommended citations Setting aside the procedural concern, I have carefully read both of Reviewer 1’s articles against the content of my own manuscript. My assessment is that Reviewer 1’s confidence that these papers ‘should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison’ is substantially overstated. Below I explain why, and then identify the narrow set of passages where a legitimate, if modest, connection can be made. My article’s theoretical take and its empirical illustration are oriented toward the Global South — specifically toward communities in developing economies (Indonesia and by extension comparable coastal contexts in the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and small island states) where dispossession, colonial legacies, and value chain subordination are structurally operative. The Indonesian vignette that grounds the theoretical argument reflects this orientation. The Arabian Gulf, the locus of Reviewer 1’s articles, is an analytically distinct context: the GCC states are high-income rentier economies pursuing diversification under national strategies such as Vision 2030 whose Blue Economy challenges are principally about institutional governance, modernisation, and moving beyond hydrocarbon dependence. That is evidently far from anti-colonial delinking, accumulation by dispossession, or ecologically unequal exchange in the postcolonial sense my present article theorises. The methodological distance compounds this. Neither of Reviewer 1’s articles engages with degrowth theory, political ecology in the Marxist or post-structuralist tradition, ecologically unequal exchange, customary marine tenure, commons governance in the Ostrom sense, or any of the critical frameworks that constitute the conceptual foundation of my article. The Frontiers in Marine Science paper is an empirical stakeholder survey of Blue Economy perceptions in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, conducted using structured questionnaires and inferential statistics. The Sustainability paper is a bibliometric mapping of GCC Blue Economy scholarship using Scopus data. Both are methodologically and theoretically alien to the thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping deployed here. Citing Saudi Arabia/Eastern Province stakeholder perceptions as comparative evidence for my degrowth framework would also require explicit and substantial theoretical bridging work that neither of Reviewer 1’s papers provides. That said, in the interest of scientific rigour and in good faith, I have examined whether specific passages in Reviewer 1’s papers could warrant citation in carefully qualified terms. The findings are as follows. From the Frontiers in Marine Science paper, three passages carry limited but genuine relevance. First, the paper documents that community respondents expressed significantly more caution toward aquaculture expansion than government and academic respondents, citing ecological and livelihood concerns. That local coastal communities resist Blue Economy expansion on grounds of ecological disruption and livelihood security resonates, modestly, with the present article’s argument that Blue Economy narratives marginalise non-market values and displace local provisioning logics — though the GCC context would need to be framed explicitly as a non-Global South contrast. Second, the paper finds that national Blue Economy policy discourse, driven by Vision 2030, has outpaced community readiness and local institutional development — a top-down diffusion dynamic that bears limited but genuine resemblance to the present article’s critique of techno-managerial universalism as imposing universal templates without accounting for local institutional heterogeneity. Third, the paper documents fragmented financing, limited access to private investment, and inadequate government funding as structural constraints. These could serve, in a carefully framed passage, as evidence that even relatively resource-rich governance contexts struggle with institutional coherence — though the structural roots of GCC constraints and Global South constraints differ markedly, and conflating the two would weaken rather than strengthen the argument. From the Sustainability paper, two findings carry partial relevance. The bibliometric analysis explicitly identifies traditional ecological knowledge — “such as artisanal fishing practices and indigenous stewardship” — as largely neglected in favour of high-tech, industrialised approaches in GCC Blue Economy research, which directly parallels the present article’s critique of techno-optimism and the erasure of place-based knowledge systems. The analysis also identifies equity and justice as underrepresented research clusters in GCC Blue Economy scholarship, corroborating the broader argument that mainstream Blue Economy discourse consistently deprioritises distributional questions — though the GCC bibliometric gap reflects a different political economy from the distributional injustices theorised in the present article’s Global South contexts. What Reviewer 1’s papers do not address, and cannot be made to address, is equally significant. Neither paper contains content relevant to decoupling and its critiques, spatial fix theory or accumulation by dispossession, ecologically unequal exchange, commons governance or customary marine tenure, degrowth theory in any form, anti-colonial framing, or value chain subordination in Global South fisheries. There is no meaningful empirical grounding they provide for the present article’s core theoretical claims. Treating them as substantive empirical anchors for the framework would misrepresent what these papers actually demonstrate — and Reviewer 1’s confident directive that they “should be included” is not matched by the scholarly content of the papers themselves. Given the procedural concern raised in V.1 and the limited scholarly fit assessed in V.2, I cannot accept the citation recommendation as stated. If the handling editor determines that no procedural violation has occurred, I may consider incorporating a brief, appropriately qualified reference to the thematic overlaps identified above, while making clear their contextual limitations. VI. Summary of Revisions Accepted and Contested For transparency, I summarise the disposition of each point raised by Reviewer 1: Accepted and to be implemented: Clarify scope: add explicit qualifying language distinguishing dominant patterns from universal outcomes. (Accepted) Brief engagement with reformist “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks. (Accepted) Review and sharpen the distinction between analytical and normative claims where genuine prose ambiguity exists, while preserving the article’s normative commitments as epistemologically appropriate to degrowth political ecology. (Partially accepted) Add a schematic figure illustrating causal mechanisms from Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. (Accepted) Add sub-headings or signposting sentences in longer Results and Discussion paragraphs. (Accepted) Add brief glosses for core theoretical terms at first occurrence. (Accepted) Contested: The characterisation of accessibility to policy practitioners and generalist readers as grounds for “Major Revision,” given Reviewer 1’s own prior acknowledgement that the article is “clearly written for a specialist academic audience.” (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The “Major Revision” final recommendation, as inconsistent with the body of the review and the answers to Reviewer 1’s own evaluation checklist. (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The citation recommendation for Reviewer 1’s own sole-authored publications, on both procedural (conflict of interest) and scholarly (insufficient thematic and methodological fit) grounds. (Contested) VII. Concluding Reflections Reviewer 1’s review contains valuable input that I have engaged with carefully and integrated their suggestions where they genuinely serve the work. The revisions ahead — a causal mechanism figure, engagement with reformist Blue Economy frameworks, scope qualification, and structural improvements to the longer passages — will sharpen the manuscript in ways that genuinely strengthen its contribution. These are worthwhile interventions, and I am grateful for them. My responses to the more contested points are offered not out of defensiveness, but out of a belief that peer review thrives and functions best on honest, transparent dialogue. I believe it is important to highlight the tension between the review’s substantive assessments and its formal recommendations, as well as the logical inconsistency in the accessibility objection, and the citation practice that sits in tension with standard conflict of interest norms. These points merit the editorial team’s consideration alongside my response, as they impact the scholarly integrity of the process. I look forward to submitting a revised manuscript that incorporates these improvements and reflects a more robust final product. Sincerely, Muhammad B. S. Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural accessibility — are substantive and have been taken seriously. I have incorporated them accordingly. What cannot pass without comment, however, is a set of internal contradictions that sit at the heart of the review and that, taken together, undermine the coherence of its formal recommendation. A further concern, relating to citation practice, touches on questions of editorial integrity that I regard as too significant to leave unaddressed. Both matters are raised below with the transparency that F1000Research’s open review model both requires and invites. The responses will proceed point by point, as follow. I. Response to “Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness” Reviewer 1 identifies three points under this heading. I accept all three in principle and address each below. 1.1. “Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes.” I accept this suggestion. The article’s critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing, decoupling assumptions, market instruments, spatial fix dynamics, distributional outcomes, and techno-optimism are intended to describe dominant, structurally prevalent tendencies within Blue Economy governance paradigms — not to assert that every instantiation of the Blue Economy in every context produces these outcomes uniformly. The revised version will include explicit qualifying language at the opening of the Results section and at key argumentative junctures to make this distinction clear: that the causal mechanisms identified represent observable tendencies documented in the literature rather than universal, exceptionless laws. This clarification in no way weakens the article’s core arguments; it sharpens their analytical precision. 1.2. “Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with ‘just’ or ‘inclusive’ Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality.” I accept this suggestion as substantively useful. There is indeed a body of reformist literature — variously labelled “just Blue Economy,” “inclusive Blue Economy,” or “Blue Justice” — that attempts to correct distributive failures within a growth-compatible paradigm rather than departing from it. Engaging with this literature will allow the article to position Blue Degrowth more precisely: not simply as a critique of the Blue Economy in its mainstream formulation, but as a framework that also departs from reformist alternatives that leave the growth premise intact. A brief but substantive paragraph engaging with this literature will be added to the Literature Review section. I note, however, that this is not a gap that undermines the article’s existing findings; it is an enhancement to positioning and originality that the article’s theoretical architecture already implicitly supports. 1.3. “Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments.” I accept this suggestion in part. Distinguishing analytical claims from normative commitments is a legitimate goal in any scholarly article, and I will review the manuscript to ensure that passages making empirical or theoretical claims are not inadvertently written in a register that blurs them with advocacy. However, I must also note an important disciplinary context that Reviewer 1’s framing does not appear to account for. Degrowth scholarship — the primary theoretical tradition from which this article draws — is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) all explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it insists that research cannot and should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology, the complementary framework deployed in this article, is similarly explicit about the value-ladenness of research on resource governance and dispossession. Applying a positivist demand for the strict separation of analytical and normative claims to a degrowth political ecology article reflects a methodological standard that is external to — and in tension with — the epistemological conventions of the field this article operates within. I will sharpen the prose where genuine ambiguity exists, but will not flatten the article’s normative commitments, which are constitutive of its intellectual contribution rather than incidental to it. II. Response to “Points that would substantially strengthen the paper” 2.1. “Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes.” I accept this suggestion enthusiastically. A conceptual diagram mapping the causal chain from Blue Economy policy instruments (e.g., public-private partnerships, certification schemes, blue bonds, concessions) through intermediate mechanisms (commodification, enclosure, spatial fix, value chain capture) to distributional outcomes (dispossession, ecological burden transfer, local value loss) would serve both analytical and communicative functions. It would also address the reviewer’s broader concern about accessibility, as visual presentation of the causal architecture can make the argument legible to readers who are less familiar with the theoretical vocabulary. I will include such a figure in the revised manuscript. 2.2. “Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments.” I accept this suggestion in principle. The addition of sub-headings or signposting sentences in the longer paragraphs of the Results and Discussion sections is a reasonable structural improvement and will be implemented in the revision. These adjustments will enhance readability without diluting the article’s theoretical rigour or specialist register. I have also taken note of Reviewer 1’s specific suggestion to add “short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts.” Select key terms — particularly those that may be less familiar to readers approaching from adjacent disciplines — will be briefly glossed at their first occurrence. I consider this a proportionate and constructive response. III. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘accessibility observation’ and its role in the ‘Final Recommendation’ This is where I must register a substantive objection. Reviewer 1 writes: “The density of theoretical language (e.g., ‘techno-managerial universalism,’ ‘spatial fix,’ ‘anti-colonial delinking’) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers.” I do not dismiss this observation in isolation. Accessibility is a genuine consideration for any author wishing to broaden the reach of their work. The suggested mitigation — glossing key terms — has been accepted above. However, I must draw attention to a significant internal contradiction in Reviewer 1’s own review. In the sentence immediately preceding the accessibility concern, Reviewer 1 states: “The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies.” These two statements are in direct logical tension. An article that is explicitly acknowledged as “clearly written for a specialist academic audience” cannot simultaneously be faulted for failing to be accessible to policy practitioners and interdisciplinary generalists. The accessibility concern might carry weight if the article aspired to a general readership — but it does not, and Reviewer 1 acknowledges this. Furthermore, Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises the accessibility concern explicitly as “a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue.” In the reviewer’s own framing, this concern falls outside the category of problems bearing on scientific soundness. Its elevation into the principal driver of a “Major Revision” recommendation is therefore difficult to reconcile — not with my own assessment, but with Reviewer 1’s own characterisation of the issue. IV. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Final Recommendation’ and its internal contradictions I respectfully but directly contest the “Major Revision” final recommendation as inconsistent with the body of Reviewer 1’s own review. Reviewer 1’s four evaluation questions produce the following answers: Is the topic discussed comprehensively in the context of current literature? Yes. Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes. Is the review written in accessible language? Partly. Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of current research literature? Yes. Three unambiguous “Yes” responses and one “Partly” — with the “Partly” concerning language accessibility, which Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises as a readability concern rather than a validity concern — constitute an evaluation profile that maps to a minor or, at most, moderate revision. By no reasonable reading of these answers does a “Major Revision” recommendation follow. A “Major Revision” in F1000Research’s framework implies that fundamental flaws seriously undermine the findings and conclusions. Reviewer 1’s own evaluation instrument records no such finding. I also note that Reviewer 1’s opening overall assessment calls the article “high-quality, theoretically sophisticated,” “a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy,” and “theoretically strong and indexable.” These are not the characterisations one would associate with an article requiring major revision on grounds of scientific soundness. I do not raise these points to be combative, but because transparent and consistent peer review is a cornerstone of scholarly integrity. The mismatch between the review’s body and its formal recommendation should be noted for the editorial record. V. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Citation’ recommendations Reviewer 1 recommends the inclusion of two references: Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science. 2026; 13. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability. 2025; 17 (19). Both articles are sole-authored by Reviewer 1. I would like to raise a procedural concern before addressing the scholarly substance. V.1. On the citation recommendation as a matter of editorial practice Recommending one’s own sole-authored publications for inclusion in the work under review is a recognised conflict of interest in academic peer review. This concern is heightened in F1000Research’s open peer review model, where reviewers are not anonymised: I can see precisely whose work is being recommended, making the coercive potential of such recommendations more pronounced than in double-blind review. The phrasing Reviewer 1 employs — that these works “should be included” — is directive rather than advisory, amplifying this concern further. I respectfully invite the handling editor to determine whether this practice is consistent with F1000Research’s reviewer guidelines and conflict of interest policies. I raise this not to impugn Reviewer 1’s broader scholarly contribution, but because the integrity of the peer review process depends on reviewers maintaining clear boundaries between scholarly evaluation and self-promotion. This is a matter of procedural principle. V.2. On the scholarly substance of the recommended citations Setting aside the procedural concern, I have carefully read both of Reviewer 1’s articles against the content of my own manuscript. My assessment is that Reviewer 1’s confidence that these papers ‘should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison’ is substantially overstated. Below I explain why, and then identify the narrow set of passages where a legitimate, if modest, connection can be made. My article’s theoretical take and its empirical illustration are oriented toward the Global South — specifically toward communities in developing economies (Indonesia and by extension comparable coastal contexts in the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and small island states) where dispossession, colonial legacies, and value chain subordination are structurally operative. The Indonesian vignette that grounds the theoretical argument reflects this orientation. The Arabian Gulf, the locus of Reviewer 1’s articles, is an analytically distinct context: the GCC states are high-income rentier economies pursuing diversification under national strategies such as Vision 2030 whose Blue Economy challenges are principally about institutional governance, modernisation, and moving beyond hydrocarbon dependence. That is evidently far from anti-colonial delinking, accumulation by dispossession, or ecologically unequal exchange in the postcolonial sense my present article theorises. The methodological distance compounds this. Neither of Reviewer 1’s articles engages with degrowth theory, political ecology in the Marxist or post-structuralist tradition, ecologically unequal exchange, customary marine tenure, commons governance in the Ostrom sense, or any of the critical frameworks that constitute the conceptual foundation of my article. The Frontiers in Marine Science paper is an empirical stakeholder survey of Blue Economy perceptions in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, conducted using structured questionnaires and inferential statistics. The Sustainability paper is a bibliometric mapping of GCC Blue Economy scholarship using Scopus data. Both are methodologically and theoretically alien to the thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping deployed here. Citing Saudi Arabia/Eastern Province stakeholder perceptions as comparative evidence for my degrowth framework would also require explicit and substantial theoretical bridging work that neither of Reviewer 1’s papers provides. That said, in the interest of scientific rigour and in good faith, I have examined whether specific passages in Reviewer 1’s papers could warrant citation in carefully qualified terms. The findings are as follows. From the Frontiers in Marine Science paper, three passages carry limited but genuine relevance. First, the paper documents that community respondents expressed significantly more caution toward aquaculture expansion than government and academic respondents, citing ecological and livelihood concerns. That local coastal communities resist Blue Economy expansion on grounds of ecological disruption and livelihood security resonates, modestly, with the present article’s argument that Blue Economy narratives marginalise non-market values and displace local provisioning logics — though the GCC context would need to be framed explicitly as a non-Global South contrast. Second, the paper finds that national Blue Economy policy discourse, driven by Vision 2030, has outpaced community readiness and local institutional development — a top-down diffusion dynamic that bears limited but genuine resemblance to the present article’s critique of techno-managerial universalism as imposing universal templates without accounting for local institutional heterogeneity. Third, the paper documents fragmented financing, limited access to private investment, and inadequate government funding as structural constraints. These could serve, in a carefully framed passage, as evidence that even relatively resource-rich governance contexts struggle with institutional coherence — though the structural roots of GCC constraints and Global South constraints differ markedly, and conflating the two would weaken rather than strengthen the argument. From the Sustainability paper, two findings carry partial relevance. The bibliometric analysis explicitly identifies traditional ecological knowledge — “such as artisanal fishing practices and indigenous stewardship” — as largely neglected in favour of high-tech, industrialised approaches in GCC Blue Economy research, which directly parallels the present article’s critique of techno-optimism and the erasure of place-based knowledge systems. The analysis also identifies equity and justice as underrepresented research clusters in GCC Blue Economy scholarship, corroborating the broader argument that mainstream Blue Economy discourse consistently deprioritises distributional questions — though the GCC bibliometric gap reflects a different political economy from the distributional injustices theorised in the present article’s Global South contexts. What Reviewer 1’s papers do not address, and cannot be made to address, is equally significant. Neither paper contains content relevant to decoupling and its critiques, spatial fix theory or accumulation by dispossession, ecologically unequal exchange, commons governance or customary marine tenure, degrowth theory in any form, anti-colonial framing, or value chain subordination in Global South fisheries. There is no meaningful empirical grounding they provide for the present article’s core theoretical claims. Treating them as substantive empirical anchors for the framework would misrepresent what these papers actually demonstrate — and Reviewer 1’s confident directive that they “should be included” is not matched by the scholarly content of the papers themselves. Given the procedural concern raised in V.1 and the limited scholarly fit assessed in V.2, I cannot accept the citation recommendation as stated. If the handling editor determines that no procedural violation has occurred, I may consider incorporating a brief, appropriately qualified reference to the thematic overlaps identified above, while making clear their contextual limitations. VI. Summary of Revisions Accepted and Contested For transparency, I summarise the disposition of each point raised by Reviewer 1: Accepted and to be implemented: Clarify scope: add explicit qualifying language distinguishing dominant patterns from universal outcomes. (Accepted) Brief engagement with reformist “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks. (Accepted) Review and sharpen the distinction between analytical and normative claims where genuine prose ambiguity exists, while preserving the article’s normative commitments as epistemologically appropriate to degrowth political ecology. (Partially accepted) Add a schematic figure illustrating causal mechanisms from Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. (Accepted) Add sub-headings or signposting sentences in longer Results and Discussion paragraphs. (Accepted) Add brief glosses for core theoretical terms at first occurrence. (Accepted) Contested: The characterisation of accessibility to policy practitioners and generalist readers as grounds for “Major Revision,” given Reviewer 1’s own prior acknowledgement that the article is “clearly written for a specialist academic audience.” (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The “Major Revision” final recommendation, as inconsistent with the body of the review and the answers to Reviewer 1’s own evaluation checklist. (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The citation recommendation for Reviewer 1’s own sole-authored publications, on both procedural (conflict of interest) and scholarly (insufficient thematic and methodological fit) grounds. (Contested) VII. Concluding Reflections Reviewer 1’s review contains valuable input that I have engaged with carefully and integrated their suggestions where they genuinely serve the work. The revisions ahead — a causal mechanism figure, engagement with reformist Blue Economy frameworks, scope qualification, and structural improvements to the longer passages — will sharpen the manuscript in ways that genuinely strengthen its contribution. These are worthwhile interventions, and I am grateful for them. My responses to the more contested points are offered not out of defensiveness, but out of a belief that peer review thrives and functions best on honest, transparent dialogue. I believe it is important to highlight the tension between the review’s substantive assessments and its formal recommendations, as well as the logical inconsistency in the accessibility objection, and the citation practice that sits in tension with standard conflict of interest norms. These points merit the editorial team’s consideration alongside my response, as they impact the scholarly integrity of the process. I look forward to submitting a revised manuscript that incorporates these improvements and reflects a more robust final product. Sincerely, Muhammad B. S. Competing Interests: I confirm that I have no competing interests to disclose regarding this response. Close Report a concern COMMENT ON THIS REPORT Comments on this article Comments (0) Version 2 VERSION 2 PUBLISHED 09 Jan 2026 ADD YOUR COMMENT Comment keyboard_arrow_left keyboard_arrow_right Open Peer Review Reviewer Status info_outline Alongside their report, reviewers assign a status to the article: Approved The paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested Approved with reservations A number of small changes, sometimes more significant revisions are required to address specific details and improve the papers academic merit. Not approved Fundamental flaws in the paper seriously undermine the findings and conclusions Reviewer Reports Invited Reviewers 1 2 3 4 Version 2 (revision) 19 Mar 26 read Version 1 09 Jan 26 read read read Abdulkarim Alhowaish , Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia Lydia Papadaki , Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece Irmak Ertör , Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey Michelle Voyer , University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia Comments on this article All Comments (0) Add a comment Sign up for content alerts Sign Up You are now signed up to receive this alert Browse by related subjects keyboard_arrow_left Back to all reports Reviewer Report 0 Views copyright © 2026 Voyer M. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 04 May 2026 | for Version 2 Michelle Voyer , University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia 0 Views copyright © 2026 Voyer M. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. format_quote Cite this report speaker_notes Responses (0) Approved With Reservations info_outline Alongside their report, reviewers assign a status to the article: Approved The paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested Approved with reservations A number of small changes, sometimes more significant revisions are required to address specific details and improve the papers academic merit. Not approved Fundamental flaws in the paper seriously undermine the findings and conclusions The manuscript raises important and timely concerns about dominant Blue Economy paradigms. However, I believe the paper could be further strengthened through a broader engagement with the literature, including literature that may introduce greater nuance to the arguments presented in this paper. There is a lack of clarity regarding the scope of the literature underpinning the analysis (are the ones referenced in the methods sections the only documents used?). In particular, many of the institutional and “mainstream” policy documents referenced in the methods are quite dated (2016–2017). Blue Economy discourse has evolved substantially over the last decade, and the paper would be strengthened by engaging more directly with these contemporary iterations. For example, it could be argued that more recent frameworks such as the IUCN’s regenerative Blue Economy and the European Union’s shift from “Blue Growth” to a “Sustainable Blue Economy” explicitly respond to a number of the critiques identified in this paper. Yet these developments are largely absent from the analysis. This feels like a missed opportunity. For instance, many current BE strategies emphasise circularity, which directly speaks to the sufficiency concerns embedded in the Blue Degrowth model presented here. Similarly, the move toward more comprehensive ocean accounting—including social, ecological, and governance dimensions—represents an explicit effort to move beyond GDP‑centric metrics. Regenerative and “nature‑positive” aspirations are also increasingly prominent in BE discourse, yet these emerging concepts remain largely uninterrogated in the paper. Critically examining whether these contemporary approaches meaningfully address the structural challenges outlined in the paper—or merely repackage earlier models in new language—would considerably enhance the manuscript’s relevance and contribution. Relatedly, I was intrigued by the statement in the methods section that “works that treated growth as agnostic or advanced growth‑neutral policy frameworks without engaging with degrowth critiques were deprioritised to maintain theoretical coherence.” While the desire for coherence is understandable, this appears to imply that a substantial portion of the relevant literature was consciously excluded. This raises questions about whether the review fully engages with the breadth of BE scholarship and whether this exclusion introduces a bias in favour of the authors’ preferred theoretical position. I was also confused by the Indonesian vignette. Several of the cited references pre‑date Indonesia’s Blue Economy Roadmap, yet they are used to illustrate failures of the roadmap’s strategies. While I appreciate that the vignette is not presented as empirical proof, this temporal mismatch undermines its illustrative value and risks conflating earlier governance dynamics with outcomes of a later policy framework. Additional clarification or more temporally aligned sources would help address this concern. Finally, from an equity perspective, I felt some discomfort with the strong focus on the Global South as the primary site for application of the proposed framework. A more explicit discussion of how the proposed framework could or should interact with Global North countries would help avoid the impression that the framework lets the Global North “off the hook.” Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Partly Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes Is the review written in accessible language? Yes Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Partly Competing Interests No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise Blue Economy/ocean governance I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. reply Respond to this report Responses (0) Voyer M. Peer Review Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.197087.r469237) NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v2#referee-response-469237 keyboard_arrow_left Back to all reports Reviewer Report 0 Views copyright © 2026 Ertör I. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 13 Mar 2026 | for Version 1 Irmak Ertör , Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey 0 Views copyright © 2026 Ertör I. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. format_quote Cite this report speaker_notes Responses (0) Approved With Reservations info_outline Alongside their report, reviewers assign a status to the article: Approved The paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested Approved with reservations A number of small changes, sometimes more significant revisions are required to address specific details and improve the papers academic merit. Not approved Fundamental flaws in the paper seriously undermine the findings and conclusions This is a well-developed and well-structured article engaging with a timely and critical contribution to the existing (and expanding) scholarship on degrowth and political ecology in relation to marine governance. The manuscript also places particular emphasis on the Global South, which represents a meaningful and valuable contribution to the literature. The author makes use of a substantial body of references and seeks to bridge these two strands of literature (degrowth & political ecology), while advancing a significant critique of the Blue Economy scholarship, parts of which overlook insights from ecological economics as well as the power dynamics embedded within broader political economic systems. I find that the framing of ‘theoretically precarious commitments/assumptions’ makes sense and is well explained. I also think that the six interrelated critiques, as well as the five principles of Blue Degrowth are nicely developed. The elaboration of four policy modalities is also meaningful, however, I’m not sure whether other modalities should /could be integrated in the same manner (such as participatory Marine Spatial Planning models or political reforms limiting the financialization mechanisms of Blue Economy / blue carbon / blue debt, for instance, see the discussion by Andre Standing on the financialization of marine conservation: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41301-023-00379-y or https://www.tni.org/en/article/the-financialization-of-conservation ) Maybe the author might consider adding a note that this is not a closed list of policy modalities. One important missing part is the following: the author has not referred at all to the existing “Blue Degrowth” scholarship. I agree that there is still a gap that this article addresses nicely. However, while reading the manuscript, it rather sounds as if the author coined the term /concept with this text, which is not correct. If the manuscript engages with the existing Blue Degrowth scholarship, it will make a greater contribution to the already existing debates. Therefore, I recommend strengthening the manuscript and its engagement with current debates by incorporating some recent literature: First and foremost, the author should cover the existing blue degrowth scholarship and position his/her arguments and critical gaze according to the existing discussions in this scholarship (do you agree or contrast the existing BDG arguments?): a. As far as I know, Maria Hadjimichael is the scholar who first coined the term in her (2018) article (please see “A call for a blue degrowth: Unravelling the European Union's fisheries and maritime policies.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0308597X17305687) b. I would strongly recommend having a look at the Special Issue on Blue Degrowth (2020) published in the journal Sustainability Science with a main Editorial text and 12 case studies exploring the concept. For the editorial, see: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-019-00772-y For the entire Special Issue: https://link.springer.com/collections/gfbiaaaich c. If you write “blue degrowth” to Google Scholar, you will also find other book chapters as well as glossary entries written by a range of diverse authors. It would make sense to cover those and position the author’s own perspective or clarify his/her theoretical and empirical contribution to the existing bulk of literature 2. Some more recent discussions around ecological economics, degrowth, and political ecology need to be added. (The author referred to some key references in both fields. However, even though they are not totally outdated -see for example, Martinez-Alier 2002-, there is a wide recent scholarship building on these, which are currently missing in the text). I do not expect citing all of them, but I do think that the author can engage with some more recent literature as well. It would strengthen the theoretical debate and its critical intervention. 3. The recently published book chapter on “Blue Economy” (Chapter 37. The Blue Economy by Rosanna Carver and Adam Jadhav ) is also an important recent reference to engage with. 4. Methods: “Analytically, the article uses thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping”. Please clarify how…. The coding process is well explained, but how did the author develop the conceptual mapping (what does it mean in this case?)? 5. I am not sure whether “causal mechanisms” is the most appropriate framing for what the author seeks to accomplish when incorporating a political ecology perspective. It is not a major point, it can stay as it is, but please think about whether another framing would make your message clearer. 6. “Degrowth Political Ecology” sounds somewhat strange as a term. Degrowth and Political Ecology constitute two distinct bodies of literature that are relevant to one another and also enrich each other (and in some cases, they do overlap). However, it remains unclear whether this particular conceptualization (DPE) adds significant value to the debate. Minor comments: Literature review, first sentence: I would add “political ecology’s mechanisms [“to uncover”] power and enclosure. Otherwise, the sentence gets a bit confusing. When discussing the critique of decoupling in the literature review, the author might add an earlier reference to the ecological economics roots of degrowth (and decoupling) debates. Paragraph beginning with “Political ecology contributes [to this debate with] a complementary set of insights.] When the author talks about “new frontiers”, I think there is the need of providing a reference to the debates on “marine commodity frontiers” as well as “blue / ocean grabbing”. Consider adding the term “social” in the sentence finishing with: “exporting environmental [and social] damage to the South”. Methods: It needs to be clarified with the editors whether this manuscript is a “literature-based research article” or a “review article”. Both conceptualizations would fit. Methods, second paragraph: Regarding “foundational political ecology works”, the author should cite both books (edited volumes) on Political Ecology published in 2015; and the recent version of the Routledge Handbook on Political Ecology (published in 2025). Results: Regarding the “market instruments”, I think Andre Standing’s excellent work might be cited. Results: “Ocean grabbing” has not been referenced. Some references linked to marine (commodity) frontiers would also enrich the debate. Results, “distributional outcomes”: The sentence beginning with “Producers face price volatility,…” needs a reference. Results, “techno- optimism”: The author might consider adding a small part on intensive aquaculture and fish feed production. This is not indispensable, though. Regarding the causal mechanisms, I would suggest two articles: Gavin Bridge, Matrial Worlds and Ertör-Akyazı et al. (2025) where the authors discuss aquaculture eand fish heed production together with certification issues. The title “Towards blue degrowth: …” needs to appear bold. In the part discussing “alternative metrics and policy evaluation”, the author might consider discussing blue doughnut literature. The in-text reference (Bappenas, 2023) is missing in the reference list. Please add. “Addressing trade-offs around livelihoods and food security…” Please consider adding ‘food sovereignty’ concept which fits better to your political ecology debate. Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Partly Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Partly Is the review written in accessible language? Yes Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Yes Competing Interests No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise Political ecology, political economy, marine social sciences, blue degrowth, ecological economics, socio-environmental conflicts and environmental justice, agrarian change and peasant studies I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. reply Respond to this report Responses (0) Ertör I. Peer Review Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r451007) NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-451007 keyboard_arrow_left Back to all reports Reviewer Report 0 Views copyright © 2026 Papadaki L. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 14 Feb 2026 | for Version 1 Lydia Papadaki , Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece 0 Views copyright © 2026 Papadaki L. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. format_quote Cite this report speaker_notes Responses (1) Approved With Reservations info_outline Alongside their report, reviewers assign a status to the article: Approved The paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested Approved with reservations A number of small changes, sometimes more significant revisions are required to address specific details and improve the papers academic merit. Not approved Fundamental flaws in the paper seriously undermine the findings and conclusions This manuscript presents a timely and intellectually stimulating conceptual review introducing “Blue Degrowth” as a framework for just ocean governance beyond growth-oriented paradigms. The topic is highly relevant given ongoing debates around blue economy expansion, sustainability transitions, and justice in marine governance. The article engages meaningfully with degrowth theory, political ecology, and critiques of neoliberal ocean governance, offering a normative reorientation that contributes to emerging discussions in the field. However, the review is only partly comprehensive in relation to the broader ocean governance literature. While it draws effectively from degrowth and critical political economy scholarship, engagement with mainstream marine spatial planning (MSP), blue economy policy frameworks, and empirical governance case studies could be strengthened to ensure a more balanced overview. Incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. Most factual statements are supported by citations, but several normative or generalised claims (e.g., regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance or uniform impacts of blue economy initiatives) would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or acknowledgment of counterexamples. Strengthening citation support in these areas would enhance scientific robustness. The manuscript is written in clear and accessible language. Key concepts such as degrowth, blue economy, and justice are explained adequately, making the review readable to interdisciplinary audiences. The structure is coherent and the argument progresses logically. The conclusions are thought-provoking and largely appropriate; however, they would benefit from clearer delineation between normative advocacy and literature-based synthesis. The article could be strengthened by more explicitly acknowledging limitations of the Blue Degrowth framework, discussing implementation challenges, and identifying areas where empirical research is still needed. Clarifying the scope of applicability (e.g., Global North vs. Global South contexts) would also improve analytical precision. Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific soundness: Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview. Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims. Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework. Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions. Overall, the manuscript makes a valuable conceptual contribution but requires moderate revisions to ensure comprehensiveness and balance as a review article. Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Partly Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Partly Is the review written in accessible language? Yes Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Partly Competing Interests No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise Socio-economics and systems innovation with several studies on the blue economy I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard, however I have significant reservations, as outlined above. reply Respond to this report Responses (1) Author Response 24 Feb 2026 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere, National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia Author Response to Reviewer 2 Reviewer 2’s report is clear, internally consistent, and proportionate in its formal recommendation. Three of the four points raised are accepted fully or with minor qualification and will be addressed in the revision. The one point requiring a more substantive response — broadening engagement with mainstream scholarship — is not a rejection of the concern but a reframing of how that engagement is best understood given the article’s critical purpose. 1. The nature and purpose of this article A brief restatement of the article’s purpose is needed here, as it bears directly on how several of Reviewer 2’s suggestions should be interpreted and acted upon. This article is not a bibliographic survey of ocean governance or blue economy scholarship. It is a critical theoretical intervention: its stated aim is to critically examine and challenge the growth-compatible theoretical commitments of the Blue Economy paradigm — decoupling assumptions, techno-managerial universalism, market-based governance, and spatial fix dynamics — and to propose an alternative normative framework grounded in degrowth and political ecology. The mainstream blue economy literature, including institutional policy frameworks and MSP scholarship, appears in the article — but as the object of critique rather than as a co-equal tradition whose merits are weighed symmetrically. This distinction — between mainstream literature as missing knowledge and mainstream literature as the target of critique — matters for how Point 1 is addressed. It also shapes how Points 3 and 4 should be read, where the article’s normative commitments are not incidental but constitutive of its contribution. With that framing stated, I address each point in turn. 2. Response to Point 1: “Broaden engagement with mainstream ocean governance and blue economy scholarship to provide a more balanced literature overview” I accept the concern that underlies this point and partially accept its practical recommendation, but I must also contest the implicit standard of comprehensiveness on which it rests. Reviewer 2 suggests that incorporating additional perspectives from institutional ocean governance, sustainability transitions research, and applied marine policy studies would improve comprehensiveness and avoid over-positioning the framework primarily within critical scholarship. I do not dismiss it, as this is a reasonable disciplinary instinct. However, this article is a critical intervention with a defined analytical purpose, not a balanced survey of the field. The critical Blue Economy literature, degrowth scholarship, and political ecology frameworks are placed at the centre precisely because they constitute the analytical toolkit through which the mainstream paradigm is examined. The article’s critical orientation is not incidental; it is the condition of its contribution. That said, I accept the substance of the reviewer’s concern: if mainstream works are absent rather than visibly engaged, the article becomes vulnerable to the charge of attacking a theoretical straw man rather than the actual literature. Accordingly, in the revision I will add a small number of representative mainstream references — including canonical institutional definitions (World Bank blue economy frameworks, OECD ocean economy reports) and key mainstream blue economy scholarship — cited explicitly as the primary policy and scholarly expressions of the growthism orthodoxy the article deconstructs. Voyer et al.’s (2018) “Shades of Blue” will also be incorporated, as it provides a nuanced mapping of competing blue economy interpretations that usefully anchors the mainstream-to-critical spectrum. These additions will be cited as the targets of the critique rather than as supplementary literature, which satisfies the call for greater comprehensiveness without shifting the article’s analytical position. No further reference additions beyond these and those needed for Point 2 below are anticipated. 3. Response to Point 2: “Strengthen citation support for broad systemic claims” I accept this point in full. Several normative or generalised claims — regarding systemic failures of growth-oriented governance and the characterisation of blue economy initiatives as producing uniform distributional impacts — would benefit from more explicit empirical grounding or, where full grounding is not available, clearer acknowledgment of variation and counterexamples. The revision will address this in two ways. They will be added where additional empirical citations can support specific broad claims without distorting them. Where claims describe structural tendencies rather than universal outcomes — a distinction the article intends but does not always make sufficiently clear — explicit qualifying language will be introduced. This point connects directly to the scope clarification Reviewer 1 also raised, and the same revision will address both simultaneously. 4. Response to Point 3: “Clarify limitations and scope conditions of the proposed framework” I accept this point in full. The absence of an explicit limitations discussion is a genuine gap, and the revision will add a dedicated passage in the Discussion section addressing: the primarily theoretical rather than empirically tested status of the Blue Degrowth framework; the heterogeneity of Global South contexts and the risks of treating them as a uniform category; political feasibility constraints, particularly in contexts where state capacity is weak or where extractive interests already dominate governance; and the scope conditions under which the five Blue Degrowth principles apply most and least straightforwardly. On the specific suggestion to clarify Global North vs. Global South applicability: I accept this in part. The article’s orientation toward Global South contexts is deliberate and stated — the critique of anti-colonial delinking and ecologically unequal exchange presupposes the structural inequalities that characterise North-South relations in marine value chains. The reviewer is right, however, that this scope should be made more explicit at the framework level rather than assumed from the theoretical framing. A brief clarification in the Blue Degrowth principles section will address this. 5. Response to Point 4: “Distinguish more clearly between normative propositions and literature-derived conclusions” I accept the practical dimension of this suggestion. The revision will include a methodological note — in the Methods section and where relevant in the Discussion — that explicitly distinguishes between claims derived from the reviewed literature and claims that represent my normative elaboration of degrowth principles into policy modalities. Signalling language (“the literature suggests,” “I propose,” “the Blue Degrowth framework argues”) will make the distinction clearer to readers. I accept this only in part, however, for a disciplinary reason. Degrowth scholarship is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it holds that research should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology carries a similar commitment. Applying a standard that demands the strict separation of normative from analytical content imports expectations from a different — and within this field, contested — scholarly tradition. The goal is not to suppress the article’s normative commitments but to ensure they are clearly signalled. For me, that is a clarification of register, not a retreat from position. 6. Summary and final thoughts Points 2 and 3 are accepted in full: additional empirical citations and qualifying language will address broad systemic claims, and a dedicated limitations passage will be added to the Discussion. Points 1 and 4 are partly accepted: representative mainstream works will be added as explicit objects of critique without rebalancing the article’s critical orientation, and signalling language will distinguish normative from literature-derived content without suppressing the article’s normative commitments. The revisions ahead — tighter citation support for systemic claims, an explicit limitations discussion, clearer signalling between literature-derived and normative content, and the more visible anchoring of mainstream institutional frameworks as the article’s object of critique — directly address the moderate revisions the reviewer describes and will strengthen the manuscript. A revised manuscript (version 2) will be submitted shortly. View more View less Competing Interests I confirm that I have no competing interests to disclose regarding this response. reply Respond Report a concern Papadaki L. Peer Review Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454319) NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. The direct URL for this report is: https://f1000research.com/articles/15-34/v1#referee-response-454319 keyboard_arrow_left Back to all reports Reviewer Report 0 Views copyright © 2026 Alhowaish A. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 06 Feb 2026 | for Version 1 Abdulkarim Alhowaish , Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Dammam, Saudi Arabia 0 Views copyright © 2026 Alhowaish A. This is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. format_quote Cite this report speaker_notes Responses (1) Not Approved info_outline Alongside their report, reviewers assign a status to the article: Approved The paper is scientifically sound in its current form and only minor, if any, improvements are suggested Approved with reservations A number of small changes, sometimes more significant revisions are required to address specific details and improve the papers academic merit. Not approved Fundamental flaws in the paper seriously undermine the findings and conclusions Overall Assessment This is a high-quality, theoretically sophisticated review article that makes a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy. Its main strength lies in integrating degrowth and political ecology into a coherent critique and policy framework, something rarely done so systematically in Blue Economy scholarship. Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness: Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes. Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality. Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments. Points that would substantially strengthen the paper: Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments. The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies. Key concepts are defined carefully, and the argumentative structure is logical and coherent. However: The density of theoretical language (e.g. “techno-managerial universalism,” “spatial fix,” “anti-colonial delinking”) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers. Some long paragraphs, especially in the Results and Discussion sections, could be improved through subheadings or signposting sentences. Required for scientific soundness: No—this is primarily a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue. Recommended improvement : Add short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts to broaden accessibility without diluting rigor. Citations In addition to the sources already cited in the manuscript, the following recent studies should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison: Reference 1 Reference 2 Final Recommendation Major Revision The article is theoretically strong and indexable, but requires targeted revisions to clarify scope, positioning, and accessibility before it can be considered scientifically and editorially complete. Is the topic of the review discussed comprehensively in the context of the current literature? Yes Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes Is the review written in accessible language? Partly Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of the current research literature? Yes References 1. Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science . 2026; 13 . Publisher Full Text 2. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability . 2025; 17 (19). Publisher Full Text Competing Interests No competing interests were disclosed. Reviewer Expertise Economic Development, Blue Economy and Circular Economic Development, Sustainability and Sustainable Development, Local Economic Development and City Economies I confirm that I have read this submission and believe that I have an appropriate level of expertise to state that I do not consider it to be of an acceptable scientific standard, for reasons outlined above. reply Respond to this report Responses (1) Author Response 19 Feb 2026 Muhammad Belanawane Sulubere, National Research and Innovation Agency Republic of Indonesia, Central Jakarta, 12710, Indonesia Author Response to Reviewer 1 Reviewer 1’s engagement with the manuscript is appreciated, and several observations — notably those concerning scope clarification, positioning relative to reformist frameworks, and structural accessibility — are substantive and have been taken seriously. I have incorporated them accordingly. What cannot pass without comment, however, is a set of internal contradictions that sit at the heart of the review and that, taken together, undermine the coherence of its formal recommendation. A further concern, relating to citation practice, touches on questions of editorial integrity that I regard as too significant to leave unaddressed. Both matters are raised below with the transparency that F1000Research’s open review model both requires and invites. The responses will proceed point by point, as follow. I. Response to “Points that must be addressed to ensure scientific robustness” Reviewer 1 identifies three points under this heading. I accept all three in principle and address each below. 1.1. “Clarify scope and generalization: Explicitly state when critiques describe dominant patterns rather than universal outcomes.” I accept this suggestion. The article’s critiques of the Blue Economy’s epistemic framing, decoupling assumptions, market instruments, spatial fix dynamics, distributional outcomes, and techno-optimism are intended to describe dominant, structurally prevalent tendencies within Blue Economy governance paradigms — not to assert that every instantiation of the Blue Economy in every context produces these outcomes uniformly. The revised version will include explicit qualifying language at the opening of the Results section and at key argumentative junctures to make this distinction clear: that the causal mechanisms identified represent observable tendencies documented in the literature rather than universal, exceptionless laws. This clarification in no way weakens the article’s core arguments; it sharpens their analytical precision. 1.2. “Position relative to reformist Blue Economy approaches: Briefly engage with ‘just’ or ‘inclusive’ Blue Economy frameworks to sharpen the article’s originality.” I accept this suggestion as substantively useful. There is indeed a body of reformist literature — variously labelled “just Blue Economy,” “inclusive Blue Economy,” or “Blue Justice” — that attempts to correct distributive failures within a growth-compatible paradigm rather than departing from it. Engaging with this literature will allow the article to position Blue Degrowth more precisely: not simply as a critique of the Blue Economy in its mainstream formulation, but as a framework that also departs from reformist alternatives that leave the growth premise intact. A brief but substantive paragraph engaging with this literature will be added to the Literature Review section. I note, however, that this is not a gap that undermines the article’s existing findings; it is an enhancement to positioning and originality that the article’s theoretical architecture already implicitly supports. 1.3. “Moderate normative tone in selected passages: Ensure analytical claims remain clearly distinguished from normative commitments.” I accept this suggestion in part. Distinguishing analytical claims from normative commitments is a legitimate goal in any scholarly article, and I will review the manuscript to ensure that passages making empirical or theoretical claims are not inadvertently written in a register that blurs them with advocacy. However, I must also note an important disciplinary context that Reviewer 1’s framing does not appear to account for. Degrowth scholarship — the primary theoretical tradition from which this article draws — is not a value-neutral research programme. As Kallis (2018), Hickel (2020), and Demaria et al. (2013) all explicitly argue, degrowth is self-consciously normative by design: it insists that research cannot and should not pretend to be indifferent to questions of ecological limits, redistribution, and justice. Political ecology, the complementary framework deployed in this article, is similarly explicit about the value-ladenness of research on resource governance and dispossession. Applying a positivist demand for the strict separation of analytical and normative claims to a degrowth political ecology article reflects a methodological standard that is external to — and in tension with — the epistemological conventions of the field this article operates within. I will sharpen the prose where genuine ambiguity exists, but will not flatten the article’s normative commitments, which are constitutive of its intellectual contribution rather than incidental to it. II. Response to “Points that would substantially strengthen the paper” 2.1. “Add a schematic figure summarizing the causal mechanisms linking Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes.” I accept this suggestion enthusiastically. A conceptual diagram mapping the causal chain from Blue Economy policy instruments (e.g., public-private partnerships, certification schemes, blue bonds, concessions) through intermediate mechanisms (commodification, enclosure, spatial fix, value chain capture) to distributional outcomes (dispossession, ecological burden transfer, local value loss) would serve both analytical and communicative functions. It would also address the reviewer’s broader concern about accessibility, as visual presentation of the causal architecture can make the argument legible to readers who are less familiar with the theoretical vocabulary. I will include such a figure in the revised manuscript. 2.2. “Improve accessibility through minor structural and stylistic adjustments.” I accept this suggestion in principle. The addition of sub-headings or signposting sentences in the longer paragraphs of the Results and Discussion sections is a reasonable structural improvement and will be implemented in the revision. These adjustments will enhance readability without diluting the article’s theoretical rigour or specialist register. I have also taken note of Reviewer 1’s specific suggestion to add “short explanatory sentences or boxed definitions for core theoretical concepts.” Select key terms — particularly those that may be less familiar to readers approaching from adjacent disciplines — will be briefly glossed at their first occurrence. I consider this a proportionate and constructive response. III. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘accessibility observation’ and its role in the ‘Final Recommendation’ This is where I must register a substantive objection. Reviewer 1 writes: “The density of theoretical language (e.g., ‘techno-managerial universalism,’ ‘spatial fix,’ ‘anti-colonial delinking’) may limit accessibility for policy practitioners or interdisciplinary readers.” I do not dismiss this observation in isolation. Accessibility is a genuine consideration for any author wishing to broaden the reach of their work. The suggested mitigation — glossing key terms — has been accepted above. However, I must draw attention to a significant internal contradiction in Reviewer 1’s own review. In the sentence immediately preceding the accessibility concern, Reviewer 1 states: “The article is clearly written for a specialist academic audience, particularly readers familiar with political ecology, ecological economics, and critical development studies.” These two statements are in direct logical tension. An article that is explicitly acknowledged as “clearly written for a specialist academic audience” cannot simultaneously be faulted for failing to be accessible to policy practitioners and interdisciplinary generalists. The accessibility concern might carry weight if the article aspired to a general readership — but it does not, and Reviewer 1 acknowledges this. Furthermore, Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises the accessibility concern explicitly as “a readability and reach issue, not a validity issue.” In the reviewer’s own framing, this concern falls outside the category of problems bearing on scientific soundness. Its elevation into the principal driver of a “Major Revision” recommendation is therefore difficult to reconcile — not with my own assessment, but with Reviewer 1’s own characterisation of the issue. IV. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Final Recommendation’ and its internal contradictions I respectfully but directly contest the “Major Revision” final recommendation as inconsistent with the body of Reviewer 1’s own review. Reviewer 1’s four evaluation questions produce the following answers: Is the topic discussed comprehensively in the context of current literature? Yes. Are all factual statements correct and adequately supported by citations? Yes. Is the review written in accessible language? Partly. Are the conclusions drawn appropriate in the context of current research literature? Yes. Three unambiguous “Yes” responses and one “Partly” — with the “Partly” concerning language accessibility, which Reviewer 1’s own accompanying note categorises as a readability concern rather than a validity concern — constitute an evaluation profile that maps to a minor or, at most, moderate revision. By no reasonable reading of these answers does a “Major Revision” recommendation follow. A “Major Revision” in F1000Research’s framework implies that fundamental flaws seriously undermine the findings and conclusions. Reviewer 1’s own evaluation instrument records no such finding. I also note that Reviewer 1’s opening overall assessment calls the article “high-quality, theoretically sophisticated,” “a meaningful contribution to debates on ocean governance, sustainability, and political economy,” and “theoretically strong and indexable.” These are not the characterisations one would associate with an article requiring major revision on grounds of scientific soundness. I do not raise these points to be combative, but because transparent and consistent peer review is a cornerstone of scholarly integrity. The mismatch between the review’s body and its formal recommendation should be noted for the editorial record. V. Response to the Reviewer’s ‘Citation’ recommendations Reviewer 1 recommends the inclusion of two references: Alhowaish A: Governing the blue economy in arid coastal regions: opportunities, constraints, and stakeholder perspectives from the Eastern Province coast of Saudi Arabia. Frontiers in Marine Science. 2026; 13. Alhowaish A: The Blue Economy in the Arabian Gulf: Trends, Gaps, and Pathways for Sustainable Coastal Development. Sustainability. 2025; 17 (19). Both articles are sole-authored by Reviewer 1. I would like to raise a procedural concern before addressing the scholarly substance. V.1. On the citation recommendation as a matter of editorial practice Recommending one’s own sole-authored publications for inclusion in the work under review is a recognised conflict of interest in academic peer review. This concern is heightened in F1000Research’s open peer review model, where reviewers are not anonymised: I can see precisely whose work is being recommended, making the coercive potential of such recommendations more pronounced than in double-blind review. The phrasing Reviewer 1 employs — that these works “should be included” — is directive rather than advisory, amplifying this concern further. I respectfully invite the handling editor to determine whether this practice is consistent with F1000Research’s reviewer guidelines and conflict of interest policies. I raise this not to impugn Reviewer 1’s broader scholarly contribution, but because the integrity of the peer review process depends on reviewers maintaining clear boundaries between scholarly evaluation and self-promotion. This is a matter of procedural principle. V.2. On the scholarly substance of the recommended citations Setting aside the procedural concern, I have carefully read both of Reviewer 1’s articles against the content of my own manuscript. My assessment is that Reviewer 1’s confidence that these papers ‘should be included to strengthen empirical grounding and regional comparison’ is substantially overstated. Below I explain why, and then identify the narrow set of passages where a legitimate, if modest, connection can be made. My article’s theoretical take and its empirical illustration are oriented toward the Global South — specifically toward communities in developing economies (Indonesia and by extension comparable coastal contexts in the Pacific, South and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and small island states) where dispossession, colonial legacies, and value chain subordination are structurally operative. The Indonesian vignette that grounds the theoretical argument reflects this orientation. The Arabian Gulf, the locus of Reviewer 1’s articles, is an analytically distinct context: the GCC states are high-income rentier economies pursuing diversification under national strategies such as Vision 2030 whose Blue Economy challenges are principally about institutional governance, modernisation, and moving beyond hydrocarbon dependence. That is evidently far from anti-colonial delinking, accumulation by dispossession, or ecologically unequal exchange in the postcolonial sense my present article theorises. The methodological distance compounds this. Neither of Reviewer 1’s articles engages with degrowth theory, political ecology in the Marxist or post-structuralist tradition, ecologically unequal exchange, customary marine tenure, commons governance in the Ostrom sense, or any of the critical frameworks that constitute the conceptual foundation of my article. The Frontiers in Marine Science paper is an empirical stakeholder survey of Blue Economy perceptions in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, conducted using structured questionnaires and inferential statistics. The Sustainability paper is a bibliometric mapping of GCC Blue Economy scholarship using Scopus data. Both are methodologically and theoretically alien to the thematic synthesis and conceptual mapping deployed here. Citing Saudi Arabia/Eastern Province stakeholder perceptions as comparative evidence for my degrowth framework would also require explicit and substantial theoretical bridging work that neither of Reviewer 1’s papers provides. That said, in the interest of scientific rigour and in good faith, I have examined whether specific passages in Reviewer 1’s papers could warrant citation in carefully qualified terms. The findings are as follows. From the Frontiers in Marine Science paper, three passages carry limited but genuine relevance. First, the paper documents that community respondents expressed significantly more caution toward aquaculture expansion than government and academic respondents, citing ecological and livelihood concerns. That local coastal communities resist Blue Economy expansion on grounds of ecological disruption and livelihood security resonates, modestly, with the present article’s argument that Blue Economy narratives marginalise non-market values and displace local provisioning logics — though the GCC context would need to be framed explicitly as a non-Global South contrast. Second, the paper finds that national Blue Economy policy discourse, driven by Vision 2030, has outpaced community readiness and local institutional development — a top-down diffusion dynamic that bears limited but genuine resemblance to the present article’s critique of techno-managerial universalism as imposing universal templates without accounting for local institutional heterogeneity. Third, the paper documents fragmented financing, limited access to private investment, and inadequate government funding as structural constraints. These could serve, in a carefully framed passage, as evidence that even relatively resource-rich governance contexts struggle with institutional coherence — though the structural roots of GCC constraints and Global South constraints differ markedly, and conflating the two would weaken rather than strengthen the argument. From the Sustainability paper, two findings carry partial relevance. The bibliometric analysis explicitly identifies traditional ecological knowledge — “such as artisanal fishing practices and indigenous stewardship” — as largely neglected in favour of high-tech, industrialised approaches in GCC Blue Economy research, which directly parallels the present article’s critique of techno-optimism and the erasure of place-based knowledge systems. The analysis also identifies equity and justice as underrepresented research clusters in GCC Blue Economy scholarship, corroborating the broader argument that mainstream Blue Economy discourse consistently deprioritises distributional questions — though the GCC bibliometric gap reflects a different political economy from the distributional injustices theorised in the present article’s Global South contexts. What Reviewer 1’s papers do not address, and cannot be made to address, is equally significant. Neither paper contains content relevant to decoupling and its critiques, spatial fix theory or accumulation by dispossession, ecologically unequal exchange, commons governance or customary marine tenure, degrowth theory in any form, anti-colonial framing, or value chain subordination in Global South fisheries. There is no meaningful empirical grounding they provide for the present article’s core theoretical claims. Treating them as substantive empirical anchors for the framework would misrepresent what these papers actually demonstrate — and Reviewer 1’s confident directive that they “should be included” is not matched by the scholarly content of the papers themselves. Given the procedural concern raised in V.1 and the limited scholarly fit assessed in V.2, I cannot accept the citation recommendation as stated. If the handling editor determines that no procedural violation has occurred, I may consider incorporating a brief, appropriately qualified reference to the thematic overlaps identified above, while making clear their contextual limitations. VI. Summary of Revisions Accepted and Contested For transparency, I summarise the disposition of each point raised by Reviewer 1: Accepted and to be implemented: Clarify scope: add explicit qualifying language distinguishing dominant patterns from universal outcomes. (Accepted) Brief engagement with reformist “just” or “inclusive” Blue Economy frameworks. (Accepted) Review and sharpen the distinction between analytical and normative claims where genuine prose ambiguity exists, while preserving the article’s normative commitments as epistemologically appropriate to degrowth political ecology. (Partially accepted) Add a schematic figure illustrating causal mechanisms from Blue Economy instruments to distributive outcomes. (Accepted) Add sub-headings or signposting sentences in longer Results and Discussion paragraphs. (Accepted) Add brief glosses for core theoretical terms at first occurrence. (Accepted) Contested: The characterisation of accessibility to policy practitioners and generalist readers as grounds for “Major Revision,” given Reviewer 1’s own prior acknowledgement that the article is “clearly written for a specialist academic audience.” (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The “Major Revision” final recommendation, as inconsistent with the body of the review and the answers to Reviewer 1’s own evaluation checklist. (Contested on grounds of internal contradiction) The citation recommendation for Reviewer 1’s own sole-authored publications, on both procedural (conflict of interest) and scholarly (insufficient thematic and methodological fit) grounds. (Contested) VII. Concluding Reflections Reviewer 1’s review contains valuable input that I have engaged with carefully and integrated their suggestions where they genuinely serve the work. The revisions ahead — a causal mechanism figure, engagement with reformist Blue Economy frameworks, scope qualification, and structural improvements to the longer passages — will sharpen the manuscript in ways that genuinely strengthen its contribution. These are worthwhile interventions, and I am grateful for them. My responses to the more contested points are offered not out of defensiveness, but out of a belief that peer review thrives and functions best on honest, transparent dialogue. I believe it is important to highlight the tension between the review’s substantive assessments and its formal recommendations, as well as the logical inconsistency in the accessibility objection, and the citation practice that sits in tension with standard conflict of interest norms. These points merit the editorial team’s consideration alongside my response, as they impact the scholarly integrity of the process. I look forward to submitting a revised manuscript that incorporates these improvements and reflects a more robust final product. Sincerely, Muhammad B. S. View more View less Competing Interests I confirm that I have no competing interests to disclose regarding this response. reply Respond Report a concern Alhowaish A. Peer Review Report For: Blue Degrowth: A Framework for Just Ocean Governance Beyond Growth [version 1; peer review: 2 approved with reservations, 1 not approved] . F1000Research 2026, 15 :34 ( https://doi.org/10.5256/f1000research.194512.r454320) NOTE: it is important to ensure the information in square brackets after the title is included in this citation. 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