Interrogating The Blue Economy Development Framework: Prospects for Governance and Security in the Gulf of Guinea

Abstract

It is envisaged that with the emplacement of the appropriate Blue Economy Development Frameworks (BEDFs), the huge potentials in the Gulf of Guinea would be further harnessed and made to complement the efforts to diversify and develop the regional economy. This paper questions the capacity of BEDFs to address the governance and security challenges of the region.  To explore this question, it adopts the Germond-Duret framework which posits that the notion of the Blue Economy stems from the spread of discourses and practices that originally pertain to land. It is posited that BEDFs, like other mainstream development paradigms, have West-centric dispositions and blind spots which means that the framework will likely prove incapable of effectively overcoming the governance and security challenges in the GoG. The paper, using a qualitative analytical approach and leveraging on secondary data, finds that there are gaps in extant BEDFs, and that these undermine the prospects for the realisation of the Blue Economy aspirations of the countries of the region. Whilst the GoG had benefited from diverse forms of international support and collaborations, the paper recommends that the region be alert to the political ramifications of these partnerships, especially, their possible deleterious impacts on development efforts.