Uncharted territories in tropical seas? Marine scaping and the interplay of reflexivity and information
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RESEARCH
Uncharted territories in tropical seas? Marine scaping and the interplay of reflexivity and information Hilde M. Toonen 1 & Jan P.M. van Tatenhove 2 Received: 8 September 2019 / Accepted: 15 May 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Keywords Marine/maritime spatial planning . Marine scaping . Reflexivity . ISA . ICCAT . Tropical seas . Seabed mining . Tuna fisheries . Information
Introduction Current economic expansions into the marine realm reiterates calls, first heard in the mid-2000s, to coordinate action through Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) (Douvere 2008; Douvere and Ehler 2009; Crowder et al. 2006; Foley et al. 2010; Halpern et al. 2008). The European Commission, for example, has high expectations of MSP’s contribution to boosting the Blue Growth agenda by its potential use in identifying space for new economic activities and synergies (EASME 2018). Also, long-standing calls for conservation and protection of our oceans’ ecological riches are increasingly effectuated through spatial measures, including a widespread commitment to establish Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) both in Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and at high seas (Ardron et al. 2008; Agardy 2010; Foley et al. 2010). Marine ecological interconnectivity is however a main cause for complexity in planning economic activities at sea and in balancing socioeconomic interests with conservation needs (Crowder and Norse 2008). At the same time, ocean governance, especially in transboundary areas, is complicated by institutional fragmentation, and/or institutional ambiguity, the first referring to fragmentation in roles and responsibilities of institutions, policies, and regulations and the latter to “the mismatch between institutions of the different policy-making settings which come
* Hilde M. Toonen [email protected] 1
Environmental Policy group, Wageningen University, Hollandseweg 1, 6706, KN Wageningen, the Netherlands
2
Centre for Blue Governance, Aalborg University, Rendsburggade 14, 9000 Aalborg, Denmark
together” (Van Leeuwen et al. 2012: 637; Jay et al. 2013; Raakjær and van Tatenhove 2014; van Tatenhove 2013, 2016, 2017). Navigating the complexity of transboundary MSP (TMSP) depends on actors’ abilities to understand and influence the rules of governing and dominant policy discourses. Moreover, governance arrangements tasked with, or designed for, planning in transboundary contexts should foster reflexivity, providing room for these actors to jointly (re-) examine courses of action, and formulate new logics which might fall outside dominant regimes and discourses (Beck 2006; Feindt and Weiland 2018; van Tatenhove 2017). In allocating space for marine uses and the marine environment, MSP is presented as an important tool that will facilitate decision-making processes. Dominant definitions refer to MSP as “the rational organization of the use of marine space and the interactions between its uses, to balance demands for development” (Douvere 2008: 766); and to “a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution
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