Conceptualizing change in marine governance: Learning from Transition Management

Abstract

Coastal states are increasingly urged to transform their sectoral and fragmented marine governance regimes, and to implement integrated and holistic management approaches. However, to be successful, integrated governance mechanisms, such as marine spatial planning and ecosystem-based management, will involve transformative change of institutions, values and practices. Although ‘integration’ is commonly championed as an important normative attribute of marine management by academics, policymakers and environmental groups, it is often done so with little consideration of the complexity of institutional context in which a shift to new management approaches takes place. This paper reviews the most cited academic papers in the field of marine governance, showing that most overlook many of the key institutional challenges to integration, often derived from issues such as incumbency, path dependency, policy layering and other pragmatic strategies. While integrated management approaches have a normative capacity to fundamentally transform marine governance, the failure to understand the institutional dynamics that may impede effective implementation, leaves much of the research in this field naively impotent. There is a need, therefore, to develop a more realistic understanding of the context in which transformative change takes place. It is argued that Transition Management has the potential to both conceptualise and operationalise strategies to address these barriers based on a long term perspective using a participatory process of visioning and experimentation.

What do we talk about when we talk about integration: towards a differentiated view on integration and fragmentation in coastal and marine spatial planning

“…However, despite this history stretching back 50 years, the verdict appears to be that many integrative efforts have seemingly failed to realise their full potential. The reasons for this include the geographic and administrative scale (Vince and Day 2020), lack of integrative capacity (Vince and Day 2020), lack of attention to underlying power structures (Flannery and McAteer 2020;Kelly et al 2019), adoption of terrestrial planning practices ill-suited for the marine environment (Jay 2018) and institutional challenges such as policy layering, path dependency and institutional drift (Kelly et al 2018;Rayner and Howlett 2009).…”

Politics and Power in Marine Spatial Planning

“…While there undoubtedly remains great potential within MSP, "successful implementation can only come by way of acknowledging and addressing unequal power relations and social injustices" (Tafon 2017, p. 3). A number of marine governance scholars have thus appealed for an increased contribution from the social sciences to MSP research (Ritchie and Ellis 2010;Jay et al 2012;Smith and Jentoft 2017;Tafon 2017;Kelly et al 2018). We respond to the call for theoretically informed MSP research by arguing that such research must reconceptualise the role of politics and power within MSP processes, move beyond its asocial and apolitical framings and seek to develop ways through which the radical potential of MSP can be realised.…”