Although area-based approaches to marine management have a long history, over the last 10-15 years marine spatial planning (MSP) has risen to become the dominant marine management paradigm. Spatial planning in the marine environment can, in part, be traced back to integrated coastal zone management (Agardy et al. 2011) and large marine ecosystem programs, such as the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (Day 2002). However, a special issue in Marine Policy in 2008 (see Douvere and Elher 2008, for an introduction to this issue) and the publication of an associated UNESCO guidance document in 2009 (Elher and Douvere 2009) popularized and defined the concept of MSP more clearly. Since then, MSP has been widely promoted by academics, practitioners, and policymakers as a solution to a vast array of management issues. It has been presented, amongst other things, as a process for implementing ecosystem-based management in the marine environment (Foley et al. 2010), a mechanism for reducing user conflict (Tuda et al. 2014), a means of enhancing