Disruptive Ocean Futures – The Rise of Post-growth Imaginaries

“Ocean futures” is a rich field of academic inquiry which spans across disciplines and employs diverse methodologies to explore the future of human-Ocean relationships. Despite growing awareness that the pursuit of endless economic growth is the main driver of expansion and intensification of destructive practices, future scenarios for the Ocean often lack explicit critique of transnational capitalism. This paper expands the field by developing a post-growth future scenario for Ocean Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ). We employed Science-Fiction (SciFi) prototyping to explore how “seeds” of post-growth thinking in current legislation could disrupt traditional open Ocean governance. The scenario consists of four SciFi short stories (windows into the future, or scenario “vignettes”) concerning shipping, fishing, marine biotechnology and deep-sea mining, and a prototype Ocean treaty describing underlying governance principles. Subjecting the scenario to experts allowed us to uncover imaginaries linked to the dominant growth paradigm hindering interviewees from seeing our scenario as a plausible Ocean future and illustrated the importance of relational imagination in envisioning radically different futures. We conclude that a business-as-usual Ocean future is not inherently more plausible than a post-growth Ocean future, and that engaging with creative scenarios can improve our capabilities in critically reflecting over the stories told about our present to de-naturalise the injustices they allow for. Because the Ocean has, historically, been an arena for imaginative speculation about the conditions of human life on planet Earth, our findings hold importance beyond “Ocean futures”. Ocean futures are not only futures of the Ocean: they also represent radical environmental futures more broadly.