Coastal and marine spaces today are awash in a global Blue Economy discursive and political economic agenda that envisions both expanded territorial power and intensified capitalism, often under the rubric of sustainable development at or by the sea. In practice, such oceanic capitalist dreaming routinely leads to fouled fishing grounds, obliteration of mangrove swamps, dredging of mudflats, (wet)land grabs of all kinds and a reproduction squeeze on peasant fishers and farmers, all of which combine to heighten rural inequality/precarity. Put another way, the Blue Economy, represents myriad forms of “taking” — i.e. enclosure, dispossession and theft — from coastal commons and coastal communities.
Contra such rampant taking, a variety actors adopt modes of “giving” that can and do maintain and defend coastal geographies globally. This paper explores the multiple dialectics of giving and taking at work around the estuarine commons of the Aghanashini River in southwestern India. Using archival and field data, I narrate the history of (post)colonial “development” and resistance in the estuary, in order to examine who engages in what kinds of giving/taking praxis and to what ends. I ask: What are the means and meanings of giving/taking in repeated attempts to develop an industrial shipping port within the sheltered backwaters? What does industrial aquaculture give or take? Ecotourism enterprises? Mangrove afforestation? Conservation NGO work? Peasant agroecology? Climate change? I conclude with a discussion of the unevenness and inequalities inherent in varieties of giving/taking as well as implications for both environmental policy and justice.
