The portal is the plan: governing US oceans in regional assemblages
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RESEARCH
The portal is the plan: governing US oceans in regional assemblages Lisa M. Campbell 1
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Kevin St. Martin 2
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Luke Fairbanks 3
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Noelle Boucquey 4
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Sarah Wise 5
Received: 30 July 2019 / Accepted: 1 April 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract We apply theories of environmental governance, assemblage, and geo-epistemology to critically reflect on ocean planning in federal waters of the USA. US ocean planning was initiated in July 2010 when President Obama issued Executive Order 13547; this set in motion what was then called coastal and marine spatial planning, but without a congressional legislative mandate or budgetary appropriation. There are many reasons we might expect ocean planning to be centered in the US federal government, but ocean planning is transpiring in a neoliberal era in which there is little enthusiasm for “big government” and its projects. Thus, the project has been one of governance, with federal and state agencies participating along with non-government actors. What does a public planning process of this scope and geographic extent look like as a project of environmental governance? We focus on governance actors and the scale at which they operate, as well as the data infrastructure to support ocean planning, to analyze how US ocean planning is both illustrative of and contributes to our understanding of contemporary environmental governance. We have argued elsewhere that ocean planning in the USA has the potential to deliver outcomes alternative to marginalization of communities and enclosure of environments for capital accumulation, but this potential is fragile. In an era of unstable government when executive orders can be issued and revoked at the whim of the White House, questions about who/how ocean planning is carried in real space/time become even more important. Keywords Marine spatial planning . Ocean planning . Assemblage . Governance . Mapping . Data infrastructure
Introduction In July 2010, President Obama issued Executive Order 13547—Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes, which set in motion a process of coastal and marine spatial planning (MSP), later renamed ocean planning,1 in the 1 In prior publications, we have used the term marine spatial planning (MSP) to be consistent with the broader literature. In this paper, where we emphasize the shifting, emergent nature of a governance assemblage, we use the term that has emerged within this assemblage: ocean planning.
* Lisa M. Campbell [email protected] 1
Duke University Marine Laboratory, Duke University, Beaufort, NC, USA
2
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ, USA
3
Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, The University of Southern Mississippi, Ocean Springs, MS, USA
4
Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, FL, USA
5
NOAA Alaska Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA, USA
USA. There are a number of reasons ocean planning at this scale might be logically centered in the US federal government, including the vast expanse of water potent
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