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This paper analyses newspaper coverage of ‘blue economy’ in the UK 2012–2020. It elaborates on Germond-Duret and Germond’s (2022) finding that UK media published a dominant development discourse concerning the UK’s marine space without reflecting on the risks of growth agendas. Articles from UK print media featuring ‘blue economy’ were compiled from LexisNexis then analysed to establish patterns of publishing, the investors, investments and projects reported, the experts cited and their statements on blue economy. Analysis reveals no sustained coverage, little that communicated with a national audience, little investigative reporting, and no predominance of London-based newspapers in news production. Reporting on blue economy was sporadic until a surge in 2020 that coincided with efforts to secure investments through local growth plans. Newspapers registered this buzz of activity, collecting statements from actors who used business ethics to express the legitimacy of their planning to build what they called a ‘blue economy’ even though this looked more like ‘blue growth’. A second group of actors including the Scottish Government announced plans to build a ‘sustainable blue economy’. These actors used the ethics of regional development, achieving net zero and protecting, enhancing or restoring ocean environments. Journalists reported critical views on these plans: inadequate attention to environmental protection, investment in activities seen as environmentally unsustainable or investments with limited regional development. Thus, analysis of statements on ‘blue economy’ reveals a discursive field featuring a confusion of contested ethical claims. This paper identifies the UK’s fragmented newspaper landscape and new architecture of public–private enterprise partnerships as important contexts shaping media engagement with blue economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is motivated by recent debates about marine spatial planning (MSP) and a blue economy, pushed worldwide for marine and coastal transitions but discussed by critical scholars as potentially facilitating a neoliberalization of the seas. It engages with an MSP project initiated in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, to formally bargain for a better socionatural state of the Hauraki Gulf Tīkapa Moana (Sea Change Tai Timu Tai Pari, 2013–2016). The paper is interested in the way ethics—proper ways of living—are being problematized and (re)claimed in MSP, and their role in remapping the land/seascape, its socionature and power relations. I employ and develop urban ethics as a research agenda, which draws together a diverse scope of work, in particular post-political theory, neoliberal forms of governing and ethicization, ontological pluralism and (re)centering alternative/non-hegemonic ethicalities. By disentangling the problematizations, naturalcultural imaginaries and governmentalities in 21 in-depth interviews, I identify four distinct but interwoven discursive strands in regard to the MSP. Two strands stand out as they problematize ethics as a means of change. The paper finds transformative potential in a mode of disruption and progressive alternatives to neoliberal beliefs and governmentality, primarily in the (re)centering of non-normative Māori ethicality and knowledge. The paper reveals ethics as a major dimension in environmental bargaining within a neoliberal urban context. Its nuanced understanding of ethics shows ethics’ destabilizing role in environmental bargaining, its role in disrupting power structures and colonizing framings, and in supporting alternative imaginations of socionatural land/sea relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]