Driving Blue Economy for Sustainable Development: A case of stakeholder collaboration platform development

Abstract

Abstract Blue economy (BE) has become one of global actual issues with a multifaceted concept to generate new growth sources from ocean while ensuring environmental sustainability. Indonesia has initiated BE programs since 2012 in Bali and West Nusa Tenggara, featuring an integrated upstream and downstream marine development. However, the targeted outcome of this effort has not yet achieved, due to a number of challenges, including coordination difficulties among stakeholders. An innovation to promote multi-stakeholder collaboration is needed to capture the benefit from the ocean economy. This paper enriches the literature on the BE coordination model by introducing a pilot project of innovative stakeholder engagement platform called BluEconNet. This platform is a digital medium for increasing the involvement of multiple stakeholders to build a participative BE. The platform is designed based on the result of an exploratory approach through literatures review, Focus Group Discussion with representative of stakeholders, combined with semi-structured interviews with representative from institutions. The involvement of stakeholders in the platform is expected to encourage multiple connections and support innovative solutions to provide policymakers with comprehensive information on the ocean economy in order to accelerate the BE development in Indonesia.