Blue Ocean Strategy is the name of a famous disruptive innovation strategy, proposing a 6 path framework for the capture of so-called blue oceans, new markets where the blood of competitors hasn’t turned the ocean red.  The metaphor of the ocean in this strategy is not incidental, rather the ocean in its reception historically represents a “smooth” space of innovation and experimentation, which not only promises a new market without competition, but also without regulation. Increasingly, the ocean itself is becoming a space for deployment of blue economy  business models and speculative technologies, disrupting the sensitivity of oceans ecosystems and their temporal, scalar and relational chains of cause and effect.

The ocean as projection surface reflects back on us the question of how we can structure planetary governance beyond territory, without leaving it to the disruptive strategies of private multinational companies. Historically interwoven with the emergence of the free market and notions of risk and uncertainty and conceptually placed as a contested space between smooth and striated modes, the ocean becomes a powerful negotiation zone for planetary governance and desirable change.

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