Innovation as Resistance: Grabbing Back Life on the Coast in the Blue-Green Economy
Term
4. term
Education
Publication year
2025
Submitted on
2025-05-28
Pages
71
Abstract
This thesis explores how coastal communities in Denmark respond to socio-economic marginalization through locally anchored innovation within the emerging blue-green economy. Drawing on Ethnographic fieldwork in and around Hirtshals, North Jutland, it examines how social innovation initiatives leverage belonging as a spatial, temporal, affective, and political quality to resist depopulation and peripheralization. The thesis focuses on three cases: The North Sea Free Trade School, the Workforce of the Future program, and Hirtshals Winter Festival. These efforts reveal how future imaginaries, rooted in the lived experiences of coastal life, serve as tools for ”grabbing back” agency and value locally. By extending the concept of adjacency beyond geography to include the politics of belonging, this thesis illustrates how innovation becomes a means of resistance, serving both diagnostic and reparative function in coastal spaces. The findings contribute to broader discussions on sustainability, marine governance, and equitable participation in the blue-green economy.
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