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The local state, and more broadly the logic of the local, remains divorced from accounts of urban governance. Addressing this omission, this article examines how a focus on the local opens up new avenues of enquiry in urban governance. It first discusses the interactions of the ‘urban’ and the ‘local’, analysing the significance of both to an understanding of neoliberalism in action. It then evaluates the opportunities and challenges that emerge from the multiple interplays of the ‘local’ and the ‘urban’, setting out five focal points for the exploration of the local: understandings of ‘crisis’; politics, meaning and affect; agency and regulatory intermediaries; the turn to practice; and place and comparison. The article concludes by calling for the study of local practices, in ways that recognise the multiple logics at play in different conjunctures, and the spaces such ambiguities and ‘messiness’ open up for different forms of situated agency.

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There is growing recognition that marine spatial planning is an inherently political process marked by a clash of discourses, power and conflicts of interest. Yet, there are very few attempts to make sense of and explain the political practices of marine spatial planning protests in different contexts, especially the way that planners and developers create the conditions for the articulation of objections, and then develop new strategies to negotiate and mediate community resistance. Using poststructuralist discourse theory, the article analyses the politics of a proposed offshore wind energy project in Estonia within the context of the country's marine spatial planning processes. First, through the lens of politicization, it explores the strategies of political mobilization and the rival discourses of expertise and sustainability through which residents and municipal actors have contested the offshore wind energy project. Secondly, through the lens of depoliticization, it explains the discursive and legalistic strategies employed by developers, planners and an Administrative Court to displace -spatially and temporally -the core issues of contestation, thus legitimizing the offshore wind energy plan. We argue that the spaces created by the preplanning conjuncture offered the most conducive conditions for residents to voice concerns about the proposed project in a dialogical fashion, whereas the marine spatial planning and post-planning phases became mired in a therapeutic-style consultation, set alongside rigid and

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