Blue Growth is gaining momentum, opening up new frontiers for economic development, with potentially negative impacts on coastal communities and seascapes. The impact of Blue Growth projects on communities and seascapes is generally understood through narrow technical or economic approaches that focus on the potential loss of coastal views or the depreciating impacts on property values, ignoring the complex relationships communities have with seascapes. These approaches often dislodge non-quantifiable community-seascape relationships from Blue Growth strategies, leading to community frustration and contestation. Understanding community-seascape relationships is key to developing more locally attuned Blue Growth strategies. We conceptualise seascapes as a triadic space incorporating perceived, conceived and lived dimensions. These dimensions have an impact on how communities experience and respond to contestation. We use a participatory photo-elicitation methodology with two community groups on the west coast of Ireland to understand how contestation occurs in places faced with multiple Blue Growth pressures and the mechanisms communities deploy in response. We find that although communities care deeply about changes taking place at the coast and sea and frame their ‘common’ landscapes as cultural assets that are worthy of defence, community practices remain impotently emotional or focused on ephemeral oppositions to specific Blue Growth developments. Such responses, however, are not strong enough for sufficiently mobilising a sustainable solution to dominant growth models. We suggest that if communities are properly supported to invest in knowledge, skills, networks and assets, they can mobilise more sustainable solutions to dominant growth models that threaten their coastal seascapes and cultural heritage. Finally, we highlight the transformative potential of the lived space of communities, not as a descriptor of a different typology of coastal landscape, but rather as a resource to understand how communities affected by multiple pressures can understand their options, capacity to resist and what their goal might be for the future of the coast.

蓝色增长势头强劲，开辟了经济发展的新领域，但也可能对沿海社区和海景产生负面影响。蓝色增长项目对社区和海景的影响通常是通过狭隘的技术或经济方法来理解的，这些方法侧重于沿海景观的潜在损失或对财产价值的贬值影响，而忽略了社区与海景的复杂关系。这些方法常常将不可量化的社区与景观关系从蓝色增长战略中剔除，导致社区沮丧和争议。了解社区与海景的关系是制定更适合当地的蓝色增长战略的关键。我们将海景概念化为一个包含感知、构想和生活维度的三元空间。这些维度会影响社区如何体验和应对争论。我们对爱尔兰西海岸的两个社区团体使用参与式照片启发方法，以了解在面临多重蓝色增长压力的地方如何发生竞争以及社区采取的应对机制。我们发现，尽管社区非常关心海岸和海洋发生的变化，并将其“共同”景观视为值得保护的文化资产，但社区实践仍然缺乏情感，或集中于对特定蓝色增长开发项目的短暂反对。然而，这样的反应还不够强烈，不足以为主导增长模式提供可持续的解决方案。我们建议，如果社区得到适当的支持，投资于知识、技能、网络和资产，他们可以针对威胁其沿海海景和文化遗产的主导增长模式调动更可持续的解决方案。最后，我们强调社区居住空间的变革潜力，不是作为不同类型的沿海景观的描述，而是作为了解受多重压力影响的社区如何了解他们的选择、抵抗能力以及他们的选择的资源。目标可能是为了海岸的未来。