Abstract:  Coastal environments are increasingly positioned as sites of innovation through living labs and nature-based solutions. Yet disabled people remain largely excluded from these experimental practices, their participation constrained by technocratic design paradigms and normative assumptions about perception, mobility, and independence. Drawing on empirical research with visually impaired people in UK blue spaces, this article examines how disability reconfigures understandings of access, participation, and justice in coastal governance. Empirically, the study foregrounds how access is generated through relations among bodies, infrastructures, and environmental conditions rather than through individual capacity or architectural provision. Conceptually, it draws on relational disability scholarship, relational ontology, and new materialist thought to understand access as a dynamic process of composition, shaped by affective, material, and social interdependencies. Within this frame, disability is not approached as a deficit to be accommodated but as a mode of expertise that reveals the contingent arrangements through which environments become navigable and meaningful. This reconceptualisation situates blue space as a relational field in which inclusion and exclusion are continually produced through the alignment of human and nonhuman agencies—from shore gradients and currents to social relations and institutional practices. In this framing, coastal empowerment is approached as the reconfiguration of the relations through which belonging and participation take shape at the water’s edge. By tracing these entanglements, the article contributes to debates on blue justice, equitable blue growth, and participatory conservation, offering a framework that grounds environmental futures in the lived, material, and relational realities of coastal communities.

Keywords:  blue growth; blue justice; coastal governance; co‐production; disability; empowerment; more‐than‐human; relational infrastructure; risk

Published:   9 September 2026

Issue:   Vol 3 (2026): Empowerment and Blue Justice in Coastal Communities (In Progress)