What does the coast cost? A research agenda

With the decided interest in the future of coastal communities and their oncoming transitions, the coasts present a rich context to understand and deconstruct the processes of displacement—enclosure, ocean grabbing, gentrification, financialization—and the potency of adjacency claims. Gentrification scholarship, although expanding from its urban centrism to iterations in rural places, has not paid sufficient attention to coastal areas as a unique subset of the rural and urban. Gentrification’s and ocean grabbing’s connections to financialization are also explored. Our aim is to: (1) identify parallels and gaps specific to coastal communities in ocean grabbing, gentrification, and financialization literatures and (2) formulate a research agenda combining these literatures and applying them to coastal communities to study transition and constructions of adjacency as resistance. While scholars have theorized that the coast’s spatial specificity may enable communities to raise adjacency claims, scholarship has not reconciled the degree to which coastal communities should benefit from marine resources and ocean spaces. We argue that adjacency claims manifest in the resistance toward (a) ocean grabbing, (b) gentrification, and (c) financialization, and come in both literal and figurative formulations. Investigating adjacency claims as forms of resistance to these three phenomena will unite often disconnected research domains and give further insight into constructions of peripherality and forms and effects of displacement.