Introduction

Blue Growth is being adopted by national governments seeking to expand their economic frontiers, yet concerns remain about how it will affect coastal communities (Bennett et al., 2018; Havice and Zalik, 2018; Cohen et al., 2019). Community opposition to various Blue Growth projects is often framed as mere concerns about the loss of coastal views related to spatially fixed marine uses, such as wind and fish farms (Falconer et al., 2013; Depellegrin et al., 2014; Gimpel et al., 2015). Accordingly, solutions to address opposition focus on reducing visual disturbance, through, for example, the adoption of viewshed analysis technologies or focus on fostering acceptance of altered seascapes. These solutions reduce the complexity of community-seascape connections to a one-dimensional, visual relationship and mask contentious practices that displace other meaningful connections. Understanding community-seascape connections and how Blue Growth affects them is key for resisting top-down Blue Growth paradigms and making its deployment more sensitised to the needs of host communities.

The emergence of Blue Growth has increased coastal conflicts (Jentoft, 2019; Germond-Duret 2022), yet many of the contestations are not new. Coastal communities have experienced socio-economic changes related to labour-market restructuring that has moved from traditional forms of primary production (i.e., fishing and seaweed harvesting) towards secondary (i.e., speculative coastal property) and tertiary (i.e., coastal tourism) sectors. Blue Growth, however, triggers new competition for coastal and marine space and resources that changes not just the way communities work with and appropriate the coast, but also how they connect with and assign meanings and values to seascapes. Inattention to how communities faced with multiple pressures seek to shape their seascapes has transformed Blue Growth into a highly conflictual strategy. There is a body of empirical evidence which suggests that coastal communities have resisted Blue Growth developments perceived as threatening relationships, values and practices embedded in coastal landscapes (Kearns and Collins, 2012; Brennan, 2018a; White, 2018; Ounanian, 2019b; Döring and Walsh, 2022). Many of these studies highlight the importance of diverse ways of knowing and imagining the coast and how processes that seek to minimise the complexity of community-seascape relationships explain some of the community anger caused by emerging Blue Growth practices.

Blue Growth should not, however, be dismissed as an inherently negative process as it has transformative potential for local communities. Coastal tourism, for example, offers a relatively accessible sector of Blue Growth for community-led development, given the loss of traditional labour markets (Pafi et al., 2020). What is clear from academic critiques of Blue Growth is that while it is framed as contributing to the well-being of coastal communities through ‘trickle-down’ economics and promises of employment opportunities, in practice there are limited actions taken to ensure sustainable jobs at the local level (Bennett et al., 2019; Barbesgaard, 2019; Cohen et al., 2019; Clarke and Flannery, 2020; Flannery and McAteer, 2020). As such, Blue Growth opportunities remain unfulfilled or concentrated in sectors that are not easily accessible to locals (i.e., offshore renewables and marine biotechnology), increasing the potential for stakeholder conflict and resistance. Although some academic studies have explored community opposition to Blue Growth, many overstress the importance of contradictory interpretations and imaginaries of coastal landscapes, without explaining how contestation occurs and, ultimately, how the dominant paradigm of Blue Growth can be resisted and transformed. There is, therefore, a need for a more nuanced conceptualisation of community-seascape relationships and an understanding of the mechanisms communities deploy to respond. These relationships take on multiple forms and switch between different types of spatial production, eliciting not just different interpretations, but a mosaic of contradictory practices and interests that operate within coastal communities. By understanding these complex relationships between coastal communities and seascapes and how current Blue Growth approaches disentangle them, we can work towards the adoption of more transformative forms of local growth.

This paper explores contestation in coastal communities faced with multiple Blue Growth pressures. Drawing on Lefebvre’s spatial triad, we conceptualise the coast as consisting of perceived, conceived and lived spaces, with each space performing different functions in community-seascapes relationships. The next section conceptually explores how coastal landscapes are interpreted and valued differently, and in uneven ways, within each of these spaces. By bringing the triad into dialogue with various analytical concepts that enhance its capacity to explain community-seascape relations and contestation. The subsequent section describes our study site, the west coast of Ireland, and outlines our methodological approach. This is followed by a presentation of the key empirical findings that illustrate how Blue Growth progressively takes over coastal landscapes displacing long-embedded community practices and relations. Finally, we tease out community responses to Blue Growth, leading to a discussion about how and where within the spatial triad communities can act to resist and transform top-down forms of Blue Growth.

Contested seascapes and the spatial triad

Although Lefebvre’s ideas have gravitated towards urban spaces as the loci of capital accumulation and strife, we suggest that the coast is equally contested, especially as new modes of marine production have emerged under Blue Growth regimes. We use the spatial triad as a broad conceptual framework to understand how and where contestation at the coast can occur. Seascapes, like any space, are not merely natural, physical or empty. Rather, they are socially produced, meaning that it is both a material (product) space and a process. As such, seascapes are complex, yet are often represented in quantifiable ways that disregard long-established community-seascape connections and the socio-political life of coastal communities. We use Lefebvre’s triad to recapture part of this complexity, by allowing seascapes to take on multiple forms as they switch between the different modes of spatial production (perceived, conceived and lived).

Perceived seascape

Perceived seascapes can be empirically observed, and, as such, they are ‘real’. Perceived seascape includes the material coast and sea, infrastructure, industries, places of leisure, work and private life (Lefebvre, 1991). Perceived seascapes provide a lens through which to understand conflicts relating to the different values people seek to extract from seascapes. Perceived seascapes are where tensions play out at the nexus of use-exchange value (Lefebvre, 1991). For example, under Blue Growth practices, the beach is not just offered for nice views, walking or swimming (use values), but also as sites for exchange values through, for example, the commodification of seaweed, fish, sand and rocks (Murray et al., 2010), potentially leading to contestation between these values.

Although the use-exchange binary broadly outlines why seascapes become contested, there is a need for a more nuanced understanding of how contestation is realised through contradictory practices and interests. The coast, for example, has traditionally attracted users seeking to experience escapism and tranquillity by engaging in practices like walking, swimming or looking out at the sea (Game and Metcalfe, 2011). Conversely, tourism has promoted hedonic experiences stressing practices that produce the coast as a spectacle for consumption (Ounanian, 2019b). For example, nudity, loud music and alcohol consumption are practices that produce the coast as a hedonic space (Pons et al., 2016). There is a clear tension between practices that produce tranquillity and those that produce hedonic seascapes which sometimes can create contestation between local communities and tourists (White, 2018; Egberts and Hundstad, 2019).

The use-exchange conflict is often unsatisfactorily resolved through the enactment of property rights. The enactment of property also includes spatially intrusive practices by measuring, mapping, fixing, signposting and enclosing the coast (Walsh, 2018). For example, looking out at the sea from an expensive seaside property affords the owner a privileged use-value that transcends the real space of their private property. When this value clashes with practices perceived as disturbing this way of seeing, enclosure and privatisation through exclusionary mechanisms such as fences and warning signs reduce other users to mere trespassers (Thompson, 2007). While property tensions are quite common in the countryside, they appear with greater frequency and intensity at the coast, where the dynamic materiality of the ocean has historically ‘lended itself to the socio-legal construction of marine spaces as commons’ (Ntona and Schröder, 2020, p. 242) and of the shoreline as public space (Hadjimichael, 2018). Such tensions are exemplified between property owners and non-owners or long-established members and holiday homeowners, pointing to the fact that coastal communities are not homogeneous, but are rather diverse and complex entities, legitimised both on moral and pragmatic grounds and embodying multiple and often contradictory interests (Jentoft, 2019).

Conceived seascapes

Conceived space is how space is imagined by technocrats, planners, engineers and architects and represented on drawings, plans and programmes that implement governmental policies (Leary-Owhin and McCarthy, 2019). Conceived space is ‘the dominant space in any society’ (Lefebvre, 1991, pp. 38) and plays a ‘substantial role in the production of space’ by directly influencing spatial practice (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 42). The diversity of actors within coastal areas has increased in recent years with the entry of new users from Blue Growth sectors, who have brought about new conflicts for space and resources. These conflicts are in many instances institutional and legal, with debates often revolving around the problematic enactment of the commons that has led to their overexploitation. The debate, however, has gravitated towards neoliberal doctrines that view privatisation and enclosure as solutions to preserve natural resources while continuing to exploit them (Mansfield, 2004; Hill, 2017; Pinkerton, 2017; Barbesgaard, 2019; Cohen et al., 2019). There is, therefore, a need to delve into the dominant mode of spatial production, conceived space, to understand how the coast and the sea are institutionally reproduced. Lefebvre, however, fails to explain the dominance of conceived space and how specific representations succeed in systematically imposing their hegemony over other types of space. By not articulating how this happens, it is difficult to envisage how it can change and what alternatives exist to the hegemonic forces that have marginalised those on his imagined periphery (Elden, 2004). To address this gap, conceived space is re-framed here as a dynamic tension between knowledge and power. We exemplify this through a discussion of Marine Spatial Planning (MSP), the prevailing governance approach for conceiving marine space.

MSP has mobilised a new production of marine space (Boucquey et al., 2019; Toonen and van Tatenhove, 2020). We understand MSP as the process of managing and (re)organising practices, people and resources in space and time using policies, mechanisms (i.e., public participation) and apparatuses (i.e., geoportals) that seek to operationalise governmental ambitions and desired outcomes. Rather than being limited to the practices and representations of state actors and related institutions, MSP also includes sectoral stakeholders, local communities, NGOs, scientists, practitioners, interest groups and citizen movements (Jentoft et al., 2007).

MSP has predominantly focused on representations of the sea through a ‘territorial’ lens that tends to erase its social and political dimensions and reduce people-sea relationships to those that can be represented and managed through geometries (Peters, 2020) or economic values (i.e., cultural ecosystem services) (Fletcher et al., 2014; McKinley et al., 2019; Saunders et al., 2019). There is an implicit assumption that if seascapes are to be brought into public dialogue through MSP, they need to be transformed into territorial types of knowledge that can be supported by governance apparatuses such as geoportals (Boucquey et al., 2016; Boucquey et al., 2019; Campbell et al., 2020). Such representations of coastal landscapes invariably offer a high level of legibility for policymakers, yet they are not neutral. Rather, they are skewed toward the production of Blue Growth and tend to deepen mistrust and conflict between coastal communities, Blue Growth developers and the government (Flannery et al., 2018; Trouillet, 2019). Although conceived space is the crucial dimension of spatial production, the perspectives, values and representations of the stakeholders that are most influential in this domain (i.e., state actors, practitioners, sectoral stakeholders) have been crystalised in MSP policy. Communities’ representations of the coast are, however, often missing from this space.

Lived seascapes

To capture (part of) the community values attached to the coast, there is a need to understand how seascapes are interpreted at the community level, which Lefebvre sees as the social, lived space of ‘inhabitants and users’, dominated by imaginaries, symbols, memories and emotions. This element of the triad transforms the coast into a relational space, ‘directly lived’ through everyday routines, and cultural and emotional connections (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 39), that are dynamic and complex at the coast (Ryan, 2012). Cultural connections and a sense of ‘belonging’ that encompasses ‘all forms of heritage, tangible and intangible’ are frequently associated with attachment to the coast (Kearney, 2009, p. 210). This includes connections to ancestors through customary use of marine resources (Kerr et al., 2015), attachments to coastal landscapes of historical, archaeological and memorial significance (Kearns and Collins, 2012), place attachment (Amundsen, 2015) and existential connections to the sea (Ounanian, 2019a). Such affinities are commonly expressed by remote coastal and island populations in which community life has traditionally assembled around small-scale fisheries (Collins and Kearns, 2013; Bennett et al., 2018; Brennan, 2018b; Smith, 2018; Ó’Sabhain and McGrath, 2019).

Part of the affinity for coastal landscapes also lies in their capacity to activate complex socio-psychological mechanisms through everyday routines that facilitate what Game and Metcalfe (2011) call ‘relational forms of being’. For example, walking at the beach facilitates views of the open sea that can stimulate a sense of ‘getting things in perspective’ (Game and Metcalfe, 2011, p. 45). Practices like swimming and surfing also contribute to an embodied sense of lived space that has been paralleled to a sense of freedom, cleansing and ‘catharsis’, all of which relate to enhanced physical and mental health (Foley and Kistemann, 2015; Britton et al., 2019). Such relational experiences enhance mental health and well-being (Britton et al., 2018) and can partly explain the degree of anger set off by processes that threaten encounters with restorative coastal and marine environments.

Although Lefebvre conceptualised lived space as deeply meaningful, he also suggested that it fails to produce any material change in real landscapes (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 93). We argue that seeing lived space as disenfranchised denies communities the capacity to act and resist the forces that tend to marginalise them. Similar to his ‘right to the city’ (Lefebvre, 1998), we suggest that there is ‘a right to the coast’, reinforced by the changing production of coastal space under Blue Growth regimes, that inevitably triggers a ‘cry and demand’ type of response on behalf of those left on the periphery. Drawing on Harvey (2012), we understand the ‘cry’ as an expression of feelings of alienation and helplessness, experienced by peripheral coastal communities as a loss of the modes of production. Empirical findings support our point by showing how several Blue Growth developments, such as offshore renewable energy (Bailey et al., 2016), aquaculture (Foley et al., 2015) or residential and touristic developments (Healy et al., 2012; Collins and Kearns, 2013) have triggered local forms of resistance with multiple implications on ‘real’ (and imagined) seascapes, either by blocking controversial developments (Kearns and Collins, 2012) or transforming governmental policy (Brennan, 2018a). Therefore, contrary to how Lefebvre conceptualised lived space, we suggest that action can be mobilised in this domain of the triad. We do, however, acknowledge that in many cases action takes on ephemeral or symbolic forms of opposition that fail to tackle the roots of the problem causing the community’s response in the first place (Purcell, 2014; Gray, 2018).

Methodology and study site

Ireland has adopted several Blue Growth policies, with the west coast featuring prominently in tourism intensification strategies, such as the Wild Atlantic Way (WAW), Ireland’s first long-drive coastal route (Government of Ireland, 2018). These policies are contradictory and produce the coastal landscapes as contested spaces. Two coastal settlements on the WAW were considered appropriate study sites due to their contested nature and coastal typology that reflects different socio-economic profiles and challenges. These are An Spidéal in Galway Bay and Leenaun in Killary Harbour

We used focus groups as a method to elicit community perspectives, in which a total of 15 community members participated. Focus groups were chosen as they allow for contestation to be identified and negotiated among members of the community (Acocella, 2012). Participant-led photo-elicitation was used as a nested method within the focus group to allow participants to bring on their own representations of seascapes and changes, while allowing researchers to tease out responses and practices to the changes experienced. Participants were asked to take between 10 and 15 photos of places within their localities that ‘meant something to them’, like places they value and/or they think are under threat. Photo-elicitation was chosen to enable the community groups to reflect on their own experiences and concerns while collecting rich data that can open a meaningful dialogue about important community issues and visions (Derr and Simons, 2020). Using photo-elicitation with community focus groups enabled personal narratives attached to the coast to be negotiated, reified and put in the social context of the groups studied.

To analyse the data, the audio recordings from the focus groups were transcribed and quotes were annotated to the relevant photos. Although the photos were not themselves analysed, they helped develop the initial (descriptive) themes. Brainstorming team sessions followed with both co-authors of this paper (who were present during the focus groups) during which the descriptive themes were revised, collapsed and re-assembled into analytical themes. Once the themes were developed, they were organised into three broad categories that nod to different types of spatial production, albeit in a broad way.

Findings

Findings are presented below as they relate to each of the three triadic components of coastal landscapes.

An Spidéal, Galway Bay

Located within the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking) region 18 km west from Galway city, An Spidéal is a prominent site on the Wild Atlantic Way. Galway Bay is also an important asset for Blue Growth, and as such, it faces increased pressures from multiple sectors, including large-scale tourist developments and offshore renewable energy. Concurrently, An Spidéal, like many rural areas, has witnessed an increasing volume of structural change with labour transforming into a service-based economy. The proximity to Galway city has also turned An Spidéal into a commuter town that faces urban pressures, such as increased housing demand, heavy traffic, and an increasing, yet ageing, population (Galway County Council, 2013).

Seascapes lived and conceived: ‘It’s Galway Bay, it’s the boats, it’s the craicFootnote 1

Encounters with the marine environment triggered a range of positive emotional responses that speak to the notion of place attachment and point to the complex socio-psychological ways in which the community in An Spidéal experiences, imagines and seeks to represent their coastal landscapes and themselves within them (Fig. 1). The way participant #3 articulated their attachment to the sea is indicative of this inherently intricate, even healing, connection:

That’s just my favourite place in the world. It’s just a sense of, it’s a sense of space but it’s also a sense of security. I feel like I’m closed in on the bay but I’ve got all this space within it, yeah. No, definitely my favourite place to go when I’m happy or sad or whatever, it’s the pier, yeah (participant #3).

Fig. 1
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The beach and the pier as restorative spaces (participant #3)

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Fig. 1]. It’s just a sense of, it’s a sense of space but it’s also a sense of security. I feel like I’m closed in on the bay but I’ve got all this space within it, yeah. No, definitely my favourite place to go when I'm happy or sad or whatever, it’s the pier, yeah (participant #3).

Cultural connections to the sea and the coast were prominently reflected in the representations of many participants. This is not surprising given that Galway Bay has a strong maritime heritage, including traditional boat-building, seaweed harvesting and inshore fisheries. Although fishing and seaweed-cutting are recreational activities rather than livelihoods for the present community in An Spidéal, these practices were nevertheless portrayed as integral parts of maritime culture embodied in the traditional Irish boats (i.e., currachs and ‘Galway hookers’):

This is the part of the coast where you can actually see them [the Galway hookers]. It’s very lovely to watch. It shows our culture, and they are also very graceful on the water (participant #4).

Coastal and maritime heritage and the cultural rhythms of life in the Gaeltacht acted as anchors around which a distinct landscape identity was constructed. During the focus groups, a collective sense of nostalgia was elicited, which blurred the boundaries between real and imagined landscapes. Within some narratives, for example, the west coast received glorified dimensions as the embodiment of Irishness, in which An Spidéal featured as a closely-knit community keeping with ‘the old traditions’ (participant #4). Participant #4 carefully reconstructed the ultimate utopia of ruralness, acknowledging the long-standing tradition of commonage and solidarity rooted in the peripheral economies of Ireland:

I value the way things work around here, that’s why we have kept the old traditions of seaweed and wall-building and keeping cattle and things, and it’s still very much a community of sharing, where they all get together and help each other (participant #4).

Some participants, however, noticed changes to what it means to live in the Gaeltacht which they attributed to the different profiles of the outsiders. This was expressed as a difference between the old ‘blow-ins’, who would move to An Spidéal ‘for the music, for the dancing, for the craic’ (participant #2), versus most newcomers, who are coming in for the cheaper rent (compared to Galway city). As such, newcomers are not necessarily integrated into the local community, especially as they are less accustomed to the routines of the Gaeltacht. This is perceived as turning An Spidéal into a ‘dormitory town’ that is losing its landscape identity (participant #6).

While relational, emotional and cultural experiences of coastal landscapes strengthened the sense of place, they also triggered nostalgia about the (real and imagined) coastal landscapes that the community is losing, as will be elaborated on in the following section.

Perceived seascapes: ‘…money is coming in now’

Coastal landscapes and resources that were customarily used as a form of commons are being gradually privatised, enclosed or regulated, and this was one of the most pronounced landscape changes perceived by all participants in An Spidéal as directly threatening community life at the coast. For example, a river and significant parts of the coast have been enclosed to private property, denying access to places which had for years been used as ‘playgrounds by the community’ (participant #2). The sea is becoming a site for experimental offshore energy (participant #3); a new hotel has been proposed on a ‘rare coastal wetland’ (participant #5); and the forest has turned into a site for onshore wind energy (participant #1). Seaweed rights are being licensed to multinational companies competing with indigenous rights and compromising the livelihood of coastal communities:

[…] I think (seaweed licensing) will be devastating for coastal communities […] People used to have a livelihood out of the seaweed, you know. And now, the ecology will get ruined, and the landscape will get ruined, and the bay will get ruined, ah sure doesn’t matter because the money is coming in now, yeah […] (participant #3).

Urbanisation has also brought multiple pressures perceived mostly in negative ways. For example, significant residential growth has taken place in the form of ribbon development along the coast and the rural roads in the hinterlands. Many participants complained about the ‘insensitive’ types of housing and the ‘ghost’ estates, perceived both as a loss of landscape identity and a social problem that consecutive governments have failed to address (participant #5).

Within the context of the broader socio-economic restructuring that the coast has undergone, the volume of change activated a sense of helplessness and anger that served the purpose of resisting Blue Growth, as will be elaborated in the following section.

Seascapes lived and contested: ‘...communities before corporations’

Coastal change was perceived as a result of economic and policy change, which triggered a sense of exclusion and helplessness. Gradually, this sentiment gained momentum within the community in An Spidéal, leading to widespread opposition that was channelled towards two key Blue Growth projects: an offshore renewables test site and a coastal hotel, both supported by key stakeholders in the implementation of Ireland’s Blue Growth strategy.

The dominant perception during the focus group was that both projects were communicated poorly, while consultation events for the test site were seen as a tokenistic form of participation to ‘tick the box’ (participant #4). Participants also felt that consultations prohibited any meaningful debate, not least because they followed a highly official, top-down pattern that left no space for questioning the purpose and utility of the development overall. Crucially, intangible connections to the sea failed to be expressed which led the community to adopt scientific language related to aesthetic criteria (i.e., visibility, light reflections, acoustic disturbance). This is not to suggest that aesthetics was not important, yet only part of the broader concerns of the majority, which remained largely invisible:

There was no consideration at all on how anybody felt. Nobody was ever going to care if that’s an important place to me and how I feel when I’m down there. Or everyone who’s down there and everyone that travels to An Spidéal as a destination, everyone that lives here for a reason. No, I don’t feel for a second there was any consideration of that. So, then [adopting scientific language] became sort of a tactic to enter the consultation (participant #3).

The volume of coastal change and lack of specificity regarding benefits and losses from the Blue Growth projects also raised suspicion. Some of the participants thought that both projects served external interests seeking their ‘way in’ (participant #2) the local community with long-term agendas for making a profit:

You know, people are very distrustful, and you can’t blame them. All of a sudden, there was a scramble: oh my God, did you hear about the hotel? Same with the test site, same with everything. It works from the top-down and it’s [pause] it’s not about keeping communities intact, people’s well-being intact, it’s about the profit at the end of the day. I think there are so many other things going on that you would have to wonder, do they all tie in and then all of a sudden there’s a big corporation coming in? (participant #3).

Resistance to Blue Growth projects eventually took the form of opposition, where concerned citizens deployed official mechanisms, such as planning appeals and judicial review to resist the hotel and the test site, respectively. Eventually, the hotel proposal was rejected by the planning authorities, yet the test site was granted consent by the relevant minister. However, the decision to grant the license for the test site was later appealed at the High Court and judicial review quashed the ministerial decision to grant the license. The unifying power of ‘getting together to fight back’ (participant #3) was in this case vital for reinforcing a sense of belonging and social coherence. There was, however, an understanding that chances to stop Blue Growth is limited, and that there is a need for ‘a different way forward’ (participant #7). Within this context, participants shared ideas about how they imagined the future of their coastal landscapes being more about community control over the assets, expressed as ‘communities before corporations’ (participant #3). A vague notion of a community ‘right to the coast’ was elicited whereby participants demonstrated a willingness to create new use-value for ‘prime coastal assets’ (participant #1) that are culturally and emotionally embedded in the local community and are perceived to be under threat by Blue Growth, such as the old school and the convent. This right did not, however, manage to articulate what this means for local action, especially as ‘rights’ are locked into a system that ultimately serves ownership.

Leenaun

Killary Harbour is a fjord-like inlet of sea approximately 15 km long and 0.75 km wide located on the boundary between Galway and Mayo Counties in North Connemara; a region identified for its persistent patterns of socio-spatial and economic deprivation (Galway County Council, 2014). Sheltered from the open Atlantic Ocean, Killary has traditionally offered an ideal location for multiple locally-based Blue Growth sectors that require milder weather conditions, such as aquaculture, fisheries and coastal and marine tourism. On the head of Killary is the rural village of Leenaun, the main population centre in its immediate vicinity and a prominent location on the Wild Atlantic Way. Leenaun’s geographic remoteness, a small and ageing population, a structurally weak economy traditionally dependent on the sea and commonage farming, and the increased competition for space and resources by exogenous Blue Growth sectors, all contribute to a distinct coastal typology and a complex set of pressures.

Seascapes lived and conceived: ‘It’s the wild Atlantic, it’s the remoteness’

The most common representations that emerged during the focus group depicted the sea and the mountains as concurrently therapeutic and cultural spaces. There was, for example, an involuntary attraction to the coastal landscape taking place in the background of routine activities and offering prospects for well-being experiences:

Most mornings, I would be out there for a run. You couldn’t actually ask to be in a nicer place in the world, running along the Killary there in the morning with the wildlife, watching the sun come up. It’s lovely, it’s heaven (participant #7).

The use of the word ‘lovely’ attests to the notion of attachment, but there are deeper existential connections expressed, such as a sense of reverence and awe, that ascribe to the coast a layer of sacredness. The ‘sacredness’ of the coast was a recurring theme in Leenaun, exemplified both in encounters with the ‘wild, raw nature of the Atlantic’ (participant #6) and the construction of the coast as a memorial space related to emigration, the history of the Irish Famine and loss Fig. 2.

Fig. 2
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The ‘wild, raw nature of the Atlantic’ (participant#6)

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Even though the sea featured in the majority of the photographs participants shared during the focus group, narratives of community identity were constructed around the built (and mostly neglected) heritage of the village. For example, assets related to sheep farming and the wool industry that were once thriving in north Connemara emerged as meaningful for the participants and activated a sense of nostalgia:

That’s the wool store. I like this because there’s beauty in these old derelict industrial buildings and I even like the fact that the sign is half falling off and it harks back to our past, which was very much sheep and wool and it was very much hardship for the local people; it was hard work, but it was happy times and that harks back to all this (participant #7).

The geographic remoteness also played a role in producing a very distinct sense of community identity in Leenaun, that resembles a ‘frontier’ mentality often witnessed amongst peripheral, indigenous, disenfranchised communities (Graham, 1997). The perceived peripherality has fostered here a sense of mutual dependency and solidarity to counterbalance their marginalisation. For example, several participants took pride in portraying the local community members as ‘hard workers’, ‘volunteers’ and local decision-makers (participant #6). Unlike An Spidéal, where the appreciation of the Gaelic cultural rhythms was the key factor in defining who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, in Leenaun, some outsiders (i.e., young families) were seen as vital for reversing economic decline, depopulation, and the loss of essential services.

Perceived seascapes: ‘… holiday houses are killing it’

Leenaun’s peripherality with the combination of the sea and mountains offers a unique landscape asset that is converted into a differentiated product for several Blue Growth industries. The increasing privatisation of coastal resources was brought up in the focus group, yet concerns focused on land-based contestations rather than pressures from marine industries. For example, while seaweed was seen as an indigenous resource that is being licensed to multinational companies, there was no coherent narrative about what that meant for the local community. On the other hand, the astonishing lack of affordable housing and the transformation of coastal land and property into expensive holiday homes pushes out the younger economically active population and converts the landscape asset into ‘a scourge’ (participant #7) for the local community:

These holiday houses are killing it. Loads of young people who have come to work here in the last few years, they just can't get foothold and they end up moving to Westport or Clifden or Galway (participant #7).

It became clear that pressures brought about by ‘endogenous’ types of Blue Growth (i.e., aquaculture) were not perceived to be as intrusive as ‘exogenous’ types of Blue Growth. Mussel farming, for example, was blamed for the ‘untidiness of the piers’ (participant #5), yet the dominant discourse shared across the table was that of acceptance:

It’s not an issue in people’s minds, provided [farming] is kept to half [the Galway-side of Killary] if you like. There’s an understanding people have to get an income, this is a reasonable income, it doesn’t create much pollution, maybe a bit on the bottom. If they’re kept moderate and tidy, it’s never an issue, that would be the consensus I think of reasonable people (participant #6).

This, we suggest, is partly related to the fact that mussel farming has emerged as a local (initially) cooperative venture since the 1980s, practised predominantly by small-scale farmers, many of whom reside in the broader Connemara region (participant #3). Conversely, outsiders like the government, politicians, external tourism operators, second homeowners and tourists were invariably held responsible for a range of pressures and changes. For example, while the Wild Atlantic WayFootnote 2 was perceived as a positive initiative, the tourism industry at large was blamed for exacerbating the shortage of affordable housing, adding pressure to the already debilitated public infrastructure and allowing outsiders to exploit the landscape through conflictual practices, such as trespassing working landscapes but with little consideration to the host community. These issues raised ethical questions (i.e., who has the right to make money from the land and the view) and further tensions (i.e., between tourists, tourism operators and farmers) to which participants perceived themselves as bystanders. There was a common understanding, however, that tourism is vital for the survival of the community in terms of local employment and income. This prompted some participants to call for more control (from the outside), as they felt that pressures were becoming unmanageable by the community. For example, the increasing numbers of tourism events organised by outsiders were seen as an exploitation of the landscape and the community’s scarce infrastructure:

- We get an awful lot of cyclists, walkers, that kind of thing. There’s a copious amount of events that go through Leenaun every summer. Now, I like the idea of people being active and all of that, but I feel we’re kind of a little bit taken for granted […] It’s a bit like Croagh PatrickFootnote 3; it’s being abused (participant #1).

- We want [tourism] of course, but we want it more controlled (participant #2).

Related to this, environmental change, in the form of coastal erosion, was also perceived as crippling coastal infrastructure and was blamed on insufficient governance and lack of delivery from elected representatives (participant #6). Many participants saw the declining population as a factor that reduces the community’s political capacity to leverage resources and self-govern as: ‘we haven’t got the cows, we don’t have the vote, we don’t have the power of the vote’ (participant #1). Attempts to tackle or mitigate any pressures from the bottom-up took informal and symbolic, but rather tokenistic responses, in which affections and routines played a central role, as will be summarised in the following section.

Seascapes lived and contested: a romantic claim to the coast

While a rich mosaic of emotional attachments and cultural symbols were expressed about the landscape and everyday coastal heritage, such affections have nevertheless failed to mobilise any significant collective action. Despite acknowledging the pressing issue of housing to keep the community alive and reverse the loss of public services, the strategy adopted to address this problem demonstrates a lack of capacity to effectively deal with it. For example, mediating with individual homeowners and asking them to rent their holiday homes to locals was a tactic that did not prove fruitful:

We would have approached these holiday house owners to ask would they rent it long term to people and most of them won't and this is our second time at it (participant #1).

Underused heritage assets were brought into the discussion as examples of assets that could be converted and used by the community. For example, the Georgian building that used to host the police station was imagined as a home that could host a family. There was not, however, any plan or strategy in place for claiming this asset, but rather, an underlying expectation that the public authority-owner would (or should) ‘get their finger out’ (participant #6). Similarly, explicit interest in the old wool store was expressed, but again, there was no action planned to gain ownership of this asset:

I think it’s a fabulous structure and I just think it could be something so magical in this village. I can nearly see a restaurant looking out over the sea. But, even inside it, there’s old equipment, there’s different layers. But for the purpose of serving at the moment, it’s just falling into rack and ruin (participant #5).

There was a feeling of discontent shared by all participants in the focus group about the lack of public space at the coast. Visions for developing a coastal amphitheatre symbolised a romantic claim to the coast as a communal space, where the sea and the mountains merge, different actors interact and layers of meaning converge to make sense of the complex space that is the coastal landscape. The discussion below has captured how the coastal amphitheatre has been imagined as a place that could embed multi-sensory experiences, cultural affections and community life, memories, contemplation, the alive and the dead:

- We did have an idea last year of this amphitheatre, so within the mountains and by the sea, within this area to encapsulate Killary, where you could have plays, you could have wedding photography, all that kind of stuff [a place where] you can look at the sea, pick up something, sit on something, lie down on something, hear something, read a book, think of somebody, talk to somebody, and you’re away from the traffic and you’re away from everything and it’ll be done in sympathy with the landscape as well [...] (participant #5).

- Is this going ahead? (Researcher)

- We’ll do it. It’s a memorial open-air to people who died, drown…It’s a real project. We will do it (participant #6).

While the community in Leenaun holds multiple, complex ways of knowing the coast, there is, however, a contorted knowledge when it comes to what is happening to them and what needs to be done in the future. Crucially, any significant strategy to tackle the challenges they are facing was not observed.

Discussion

In this paper we added analytical depth to Lefebvre’s spatial triad by bringing it into dialogue with contemporary critical analytical concepts and experimenting with methodologies, like using photo-elicitation with a community group, which has the potential to reveal a lot about local perspectives and values attached to the seascape. At the same time, photo-elicitation can broadly ‘map’ what assets are important to communities as emotional geographies, and especially the assets and relationships embedded in places that are perceived as threatened by Blue Growth. In this context, community photo-elicitation can provide a framework to prioritise how coastal land- and sea- scapes are valorised and commodified and as such, it could become tactically useful in a way a formal survey may not. By elucidating not just community understandings and imaginaries but also practices and (lack of) actions, we raise several critical discussion points.

First, the real vs. imagined binary Lefebvre has mobilised to conceptualise contestation is a simplistic dichotomy that may be useful for foregrounding the existence of tensions and conflict, but which nevertheless fails to explain how different understandings of coastal landscape create contestation and conflict. Here, the analysis focused on Lefebvre’s distinction between use and exchange value, not to suggest that they align with a different type of real or imagined space, but to stress that representational processes promote, designate and incentivize Blue Growth profit over everyday social relationships and immaterial people-landscape connections. The argument is that the predominant model through which Blue Growth is being implemented, produces spatial representations of the coast and the sea as a site of surplus and wealth. In doing so, it disembeds it from its social moorings. The land and the sea, labour and employment and the role of finance (especially in speculative coastal development) are all mobilised in the chain of Blue Growth production and consumption, which is the fundamental underlying factor that causes contestation at the coast, not least because it aims to remove from people (and communities) their landscapes. Many of these processes are not new but are nevertheless intensifying under Blue Growth regimes. Therefore, Blue Growth, its impacts on coastal landscapes, and the ensuing contestation cannot be discussed separately from the disembedding processes that take place over recursive generations through taken-for-granted assumptions, unwritten rules, and reinforced patterns of spatial practices at the coast and sea. Such disembedding processes are careful, sometimes aggressive, but fundamentally incomplete and imperfect, leaving space for communities to respond.

Community responses are born in the realm of lived space, whose significance and (potentially) transformative power is downplayed in Lefebvre’s analysis of space. We argue that while Lefebvre’s analysis is relevant, it should not be treated as a mere descriptor of a type of emotional space but rather as a resource to understand how communities affected by imposed social (and economic) constructs can understand their options, capacity to resist what their ultimate goal might be. This brings up a related critical point about the triad which points to an insufficient problematisation of the contingent nature of power and the dynamics that enable the repetition of the hegemonic spatial production Lefebvre conceptualises through the spatial triad. His limited analysis of how hegemonic spatial reproduction takes place frames it as something almost impossible to change. Indeed, Lefebvre fails to acknowledge that community responses in the domain of lived space can produce material change with significant implications for dominant spatial practice. Such responses, however, are themselves often poorly understood, politically weak or misdirected. Here, the paper explored the presence and intensity of such responses at the Irish west coast, their effectiveness, and how resisting Blue Growth logics might be articulated by taking control of Blue Growth processes in more inclusive ways.

The analysis found a mix of responses including what Lefebvre would call a ‘cry and demand’ approach that were witnessed to a different degree in the case studies. Investment in symbolically loaded responses and calling on elected representatives for help is a useful, disruptive and potentially effective tactic. If communities do not ‘cry’, they are not likely to get noticed, and if they do not gain political support, they are not likely to leverage the necessary (political, policy, financial and land-use) resources for change. However, overemphasising such responses also points to the contorted knowledge communities hold as to what is happening to them, who is to blame and who they rely on for help. In many instances, it is mainly those that the community perceives as the ‘outsiders’ that become framed as responsible for the volume of pressures affecting coastal landscapes and seascapes. The paradox is that it is sometimes the same outsiders that coastal communities often depend on for help. This finding reveals a deeply established pattern of vulnerability and dependency on external forces to fix local problems and contestations. The way in which the division between insiders and outsiders is constructed, however, differs significantly among different communities, suggesting that clear-cut insider– outsider divisions are not very useful conceptual binaries for explaining contestation. Other responses included resisting specific developments at the coast by using quite sophisticated (semi-) legal means (planning appeals and judicial reviews). Regardless of how effective, such mechanisms are one-off solutions, that are also locked into property rights. Most coastal communities, however, do not hold such legal rights or titles on the sea or the coastal land, meaning that such tactics can hardly be relied upon as a long-term strategy.

Conclusions

The findings have policy implications, as they show how local communities care deeply about the changes taking place at the coast and the sea and how this culture of care leads them to frame their ‘common’ landscapes as cultural assets that are worthy of defence. There is value in all community responses as no matter how short-lived or ephemeral they may be be, they show a willingness to act to improve their areas. The tactics that coastal communities have deployed here, however, are not strong enough for sufficiently mobilising a sustainable solution to dominant growth models. A vague claim for a collective ‘right’ to the coast may have been socially inspiring and instigating from a political point of view, but if this claim is not underpinned by a coherent agenda of what this ‘right’ means for local action, it can hardly make any viable difference. Ultimately, it is not as much about what form community responses take, but how useful they are to the lives of those left out of the processes that transform coastal landscapes and seascapes.

It is argued that pressures are not likely to stop, especially as they are actively encouraged and even incentivized. In other words, peripheral coastal communities are unlikely to stop economic development models that support high-value Blue Growth sectors. What they can do, if properly supported, is redefine value, what it means to local people and prioritise more ethical and sustainable forms of ‘growth’, that will promote less conflictual forms of seascape valorisation. Therefore, a pragmatic option available to weak and ill-prepared communities that lack coherent agendas and actions would be to invest in knowledge, assets, networks and skills. Towards this endeavour, policies could support coastal communities to become more actively involved in development, marine planning and governance.