Blue Finance Project Staff - Anonymous Failed Funding Case Studies

The usual explanation for a failed blue finance project is a lack of capital. What I want to know is why it couldn’t raise more money. I’ve said before that we need to know more about the failures in ocean finance. If I were building the record, it would be a catalog of failed case studies, anonymized and easy to look through by instrument and by geography. The people who worked on each project would contribute to it. What gets recorded is the timeline, the runway, the specifics of the project and the reason it didn’t work. Then I’d feed all of it into AI to see whether there’s a pattern. There’s so much to learn from failed deals and failed projects. Two things make it hard. The first is stigma. People don’t want to talk about failure, and when it happens, they want to turn the page. Sitting down to say “this is what happened and this is why it failed” takes another layer of self-awareness. The second is being honest about the cause. Sometimes it’s obvious. Such as, we didn’t have enough customers. But often it isn’t and you can blame a gazillion things, none of which may be the real reason. Failures in ocean finance also remind me of something I learned from Prof. Leith Sharp when I studied Sustainability Leadership at Harvard University. She calls it the "Squiggle" - the messy, non-linear part between the start of a project and the clean story we tell about it afterwards. Projects rarely fail in one neat moment. They change direction, hit constraints, lose momentum, adapt and sometimes stop. If we only record the beginning and the outcome, we lose the part that may teach us the most. Having the big picture would be a very useful step. If you’ve worked on a project that didn’t make it and you’d be willing to record it anonymously, I’d like to hear from you.