Empowerment and Blue Justice in Coastal Communities

As coastal communities across Europe navigate the challenges and opportunities of blue growth, issues of environmental justice, empowerment, and sustainability emerge as central concerns. While policies like the European Green Deal and the blue economy framework promise inclusive and sustainable development, many coastal regions—especially those in peripheral areas—face persistent challenges of recognition, resource distribution, and procedural fairness.

This thematic issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives to examine how coastal communities are engaging with transition processes, sustainability transformations, and justice concerns. Through empirical studies and theoretical reflections, the issue explores how communities redefine their relationships with marine resources, negotiate power dynamics in environmental governance, and develop innovative socio-ecological and socio-technical tools for inclusive coastal futures.

Key themes include:

•    Transition mechanisms and changed practices: examining how co-creation processes transform marine governance, evidenced through case studies in just and inclusive coastal transitions.

• Co-creation and participatory governance: analysing knowledge co-production and participatory methods for sustainable marine resource management.
• Blue justice and local empowerment: exploring conflicts in marine planning, displacement, and exclusion, including perspectives on planning in absentia.

•    Alternative blue economies: assessing how traditional coastal knowledge can be institutionalized to ensure equity, including the leaving no one behind (LNOB) principles.

• Living Labs and Nature-Based Solutions: understanding how experimental approaches such as Transition Coastal Labs (TCLs) contribute to participatory conservation.

By drawing on case studies including Norway, Finland, Spain, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Ireland, this thematic issue provides a comparative lens on the struggles and possibilities of coastal empowerment. It aims to advance scholarly and policy discussions on how to ensure that blue growth agendas do not replicate past inequalities but instead contribute to equitable and thriving coastal futures.

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