Blue grabbing: Reviewing marine conservation in Redang Island Marine Park,Malaysia

While academic literature and media attention has rightly focused on the numerous instances of land grabbing taking place in various corners of the world, far less attention is paid to the enclosure, appropriation and dispossession taking place in the guise of marine conservation – or the recently developed concept of “blue grabbing”. Blue grabbing articulates how marine conservation results in the appropriation of marine resources and coastal land from previous custodians by more powerful actors, such as state and tourist operators. Blue grabbing can be considered a form of primitive accumulation, yet dispossession via marine conservation does not take the conventional form of privatising land, as the spaces involved are still formally state-owned areas. Rather, it is the benefits from natural resources that contribute to capital accumulation of tourist operators and indirectly the state. Restrictions on local resource use are justified using degradation narratives of “overfishing”, while financial benefits from tourism are drained from local communities within a system lacking transparency. This intervention draws on fieldwork research to reveal how blue grabbing plays out in Redang Island Marine Park, Malaysia, yet given that blue grabbing is a recently developed concept, argues there is a pressing need for research to build a more informed picture.