Chapter 9 ‘A Brilliant Future of Floating Islands’: Sea Level Rise as New Profit Frontier
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Abstract
In January 2017, the Seasteading Institute, a small Californian non-profit organization that advocates for the construction of autonomous floating cities in international waters, announced the signature of a memorandum of understanding with the government of French Polynesia to begin studies on the feasibility of a pilot project in the archipelago’s protected waters. The project would include the creation of ‘innovative special economic zones’ which would comprise a part of land (the ‘Anchor Zone’) and of sea (the ‘Floating Islands Zone’). To understand how the Floating Island Project was rationalised, it is essential to consider how it was situated in the broader discourse of ‘green growth’ and ‘blue-green economy’ by both seasteaders and the French Polynesian government, and how this discourse was used to make the development of innovative special economic zones desirable. This chapter offers a discursive analysis of both the Floating Island Project as an exercise in ‘extrastatecraft’ and a libertarian political venture steeped in evolutionary economics and also as a smart, blue-green territorial fix for island nations and coastal cities threatened by the effects of climate change.