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For many coastal nations in the western Indian Ocean (WIO), and notably the islands of Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles, the tuna fishery is considered one of the main pillars of economic development, providing jobs and substantial revenues whilst ensuring food security. But these fisheries are also an illustration of the paradox behind the idea of the blue economy, where economic growth and sustainable use of resources are promoted as jointly achievable. We show that a sustainability narrative, in which the idea of fishing within ecological limits is present within government policy, public discourse and practices, is however, in contradiction with the realities of accumulation and growth that prevail in the fishery. When measures towards ecological preservation are to be taken, geopolitics of access to the sea and tuna enter the stage and change the position and narrative of the same actors, governments and industrial actors, that promote sustainability. We emphasize the difficult and nearly impossible path of practicing sustainability in the current model of growth-driven tuna fisheries. We argue for the need to repoliticize the practice of sustainability through the questioning of what we see in tuna fisheries: a hegemonic narrative of sustainability and implicit growth, without positive socio-ecological transformations.

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Many African countries are progressively embracing the blue economy. African islands of the western Indian Ocean, however, have been involved in it for more than twenty years through the exploitation of their 'blue gold': tuna. In this article, we use Ribot and Peluso's (2003) "theory of access" to map the different ways actors access tuna under diverse socio-economic contexts and how power relations are created through different mechanisms of access. We show that rights-based mechanisms such as fishing access agreements are highly questionable for their fairness and sustainability but bring benefits such as funding for fisheries-related infrastructures and projects. We also show that access to the resource is dependent on knowledge held by fishers, on technological advances as well as on diverse labor relations. These mechanisms significantly impact the quantity of fish that can be accessed by artisanal versus industrial market sectors, and generate narratives of unequal access to tuna. Furthermore, we take into consideration the materiality of tuna as a highly mobile resource in a space of fluid boundaries, to show how the fish can be an actant in shaping access but also how fishing practices can produce new materialities. Based on the above evidence, we propose an enhancement of the theory of access to consider the role of materiality of the resources and the sea. We conclude that to ensure that tuna fisheries continue to contribute to the blue economy of African islands, stakeholders need to balance between the diverse benefits produced by the fisheries and the uneven power relations that can arise, and to integrate the impact of a material sea and fish in this reflection. Keywords: fishers, knowledge, materiality, power relations, spatiality of the sea, technology, Madagascar, Mauritius, Seychelles

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