Maritime Bordering, Wind Energy, and Anticipated Futures

Contested and lived marine spaces epitomize complex interactions between the geopolitical and geophysical in today’s turbulent world, due to multiple factors like territorial control, climate and security concerns, future projections, and oceanic fluid dynamics contributing to changes and co-existences. This paper elaborates on the more-than-human approach in bordering, aiming to understand emergent territories shaped by political ecologies and spatial consolidations. The focus is on Saaremaa Island, Estonia, the territorial rationalities and temporalities in voluminous land-and-sea bordering, and how they are entangled with off-shore energy planning around the island. Saaremaa has a distinctive position at the intersection of global renewable energy transition, geopolitical sensitivities of the Baltic Sea, and a strong local identity. In this context of maritime bordering around offshore energy development, new territorial forms and temporalities emerge as essential subsistence networks, transforming political ecologies. Land-and-sea bordering mobilizes territorial forms as part of “becoming terrestrial,” which brings together geopolitical and geophysical dimensions in spatializing emergent sea-based functions. The integration of time and futurity into analyses of maritime borders reveal the durations and contingencies that underpin essential territorial formations, highlighting the need to attend to plural temporalities in the evolving geographies of the sea.