Women in small-scale fishing communities bear the worst impacts as coastal space in the Indian Ocean region is increasingly encroached upon by state and private activities.

This article is based on a cross-regional study that focused on how ruptures in the form of environmental stress and political economic pressures impacted small-scale fishing communities and were especially mediated by the intersectional social relations of gender, ethnicity/race, caste, class, and place. Drawing upon the work of David Harvey, the research team investigated how capitalist accumulation physically, discursively, and institutionally constrained access by small-scale coastal actors to spaces for action. Our observation is that the space for action by small-scale actors and populations in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is increasingly being encroached upon by state and private activities. We label these processes of dispossession as ‘shrinking space’.