From the Land to Sea and Back Again? Using Terrestrial Planning to Understand the Process of Marine Spatial Planning

TLDR

Marine spatial planning (MSP) has emerged over the past decade as a new management regime for national and international waters, attracting multidisciplinary research on its goals and policy processes, while comparisons with terrestrial spatial planning (TSP) highlight limitations but also offer a social‑science debate tradition that can stimulate more rigorous reflection on MSP. The paper seeks to fill a gap in MSP scholarship by initiating a reflexive comparison with TSP, exploring parallels and intellectual traditions to stimulate deeper debate on MSP’s core concepts, assumptions, and institutional arrangements. The authors compare MSP to TSP, examining parallels and key intellectual traditions that have shaped TSP to inform future marine planning practice. The study identifies several promising research avenues that could form the basis of a critical agenda for future MSP.

Abstract

Over the last 5–10 years, marine spatial planning (MSP) has emerged as a new management regime for national and international waters and has already attracted a substantial body of multi-disciplinary research on its goals and policy processes. This paper argues that this literature has generally lacked deeper reflexive engagement with the emerging system of governance for our seas that has meant that many of MSP's core concepts, assumptions and institutional arrangements have not been subject rigorous intellectual debate. In an attempt to initiate such an approach, this article explores the relationship between MSP and its land-based cousin, terrestrial spatial planning (TSP). While it is recognized that there are inherent limitations to a comparison of these two systems, it is argued that the tradition of social science debate over the purpose and processes of TSP can be used as a useful stimulus for a more rigorous reflection of such issues as they relate to MSP. The article therefore explores some of the parallels between MSP and TSP and then discusses some of the key intellectual traditions that have shaped TSP and the implications these may have for future marine planning practice. The article concludes with a number of potentially useful new avenues that may form the basis of a critical research agenda for MSP.