Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) has been heralded as the key means of achieving a more integrated approach to marine use across sectors and spatial scales. Achieving greater integration and coherence in MSP governance arrangements is seen as a way to resolve current problems of marine governance (such as fragmentation) and address future resource demands in a sustainable way. However, there is a lack of clarity and consensus in practice regarding sustainability in MSP, both in terms of MSP governance practices and sustainable resource use. For example, how are we to treat the environment in MSP? Should we conceive the environment as just another sector with interests to be negotiated, or as the very boundary condition that limits possibilities for maritime activities and developments? How do we integrate diverse views on this in MSP decision-making? This is but one example of an integration challenge in MSP important for sustainability. There are numerous others. Integration is intimately connected to the ability of MSP to deliver sustainable marine resource use at various levels and scales. The roles of integration are diverse and interconnected, including those that affect social-ecological integration or land-sea interaction, but also aspects of good governance and social sustainability. The latter include inter-sectoral decisionmaking, stakeholder engagement, cross-border interaction and knowledge pluralism. How integration is exercised in these procedural aspects of MSP is likely to substantively affect outcomes both in terms of sustainable blue growth or the ability to deliver an ecosystem-based approach. Integration as a policy and analytical problem to be addressed has also been discussed elsewhere – most saliently in the fields of sustainable development, ICZM, environmental policy integration, planning theory and socio-ecological systems. While there has been some work on integration in MSP, additional insight is needed: to better empirically ground the roles of integration in MSP, to understand the multidimensionality and interdependencies of integration dimensions and to unpack what ‘balance’ might mean for understanding and pursuing sustainability in different MSP contexts. In response, this special issue aims to explore the roles, problems and opportunities of various types of integration in relation to MSP's sustainability ambitions.

While there is growing critique emerging to address social sustainability in marine/maritime spatial planning (MSP), overwhelmingly attention has been on governance, economic and environmental aspects. This chapter redresses this by proposing a conceptual framework to elucidate key features of social sustainability in MSP. The ambition is to both note the existing critique of MSP and go beyond it by more clearly and comprehensively articulating how social sustainability could be conceived in MSP, as well as how this framework could be applied to analyse MSP practice. Key features of social sustainability elaborated are: deepening democratic decision-making, inclusion of socio-cultural values and knowledge, equitable distribution and social cohesion. Finally, the chapter concludes by nominating strategies to give greater visibility to social sustainability as a key MSP concern.

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 unreflexive interpretations and applications of legality. We conclude by setting out the limits of the Estonian marine spatial planning as a process for resolving conflicts, while offering an alternative model of handling such public controversies, which we call pragmatic adversarialism.

The EU Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (MSP Directive) from 2014 is an example of a so-called new generation directive, which gives Member States room for adaptation to national contexts. Because of this larger room for adaptation, transposition becomes a process of designing domestic policy frameworks that fulfil the broad requirements of the Directive, rather than a simple and linear implementation procedure. However, allowing Member States to design marine spatial planning frameworks that fit domestic contexts, have thus far meant that regional coherence suffers. Although the pivotal role of transnational coordination is emphasised in the Directive, it does not stipulate how to set up such coordination, and the Member States have not yet been able to achieve much of self-organising in this area.A closer look is in this report taken on four policy-dimensions that are emphasised in the MSP Directive: Planning approach, Organisation, Sustainability, and Stakeholder inclusion. Based on in-depth case studies carried out in the BALTSPACE research project on MSP frameworks in Denmark, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden, examples of coordination and coherency challenges are described and discussed for each dimension.It is shown that planning approaches can differ substantially between neighbouring countries, which can make it challenging to coordinate across country borders. Even though they share the same (EU) regulatory pressures, Latvia and Lithuania, for example, are developing national MSP frameworks based on quite different conceptual foundations. Whereas Latvia has taken the Ecosystem Approach as a point of departure for constructing a new MSP framework, Lithuania has instead chosen to adapt existing functional zoning approaches to management of maritime areas. Such diversity may be possible to explain because of differing domestic contexts, but may nevertheless lead to coordination problems when coordination is needed.Divergence between national MSP frameworks can also emerge from different political, jurisdictional and, administrative systems and traditions, that is, in societal organisation. In an example based on case studies undertaken in Denmark and Sweden, it is shown that degree of societal centralisation and distribution of political power can be related to differences in how environmental protection and blue growth are prioritised. However, it is difficult to tell whether diverging prioritisations have led to differences on organisation, or of it is the other way around, that differences in organisation have led to diverging prioritisations.It is stated in the MSP Directive that the overarching objective is to promote sustainable development. The focus on sustainable development can be said to reflect the Directive’s new generation characteristics. The concept of sustainable development is broad and imprecise, which facilitates political agreement. However, when more precise details must be addressed, disagreements may surface that make implementation challenging. In cases where neighbouring countries diverge substantially on how ecological, economic and social sustainable ought to be balanced, finding agreements on how to coordinate policies and practices, when needed, can be difficult. Based on case studies in Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, and Sweden, it is, for example, argued that adoption of functional zoning or the Ecosystem Approach may not say much about how ecological, economic, and social dimensions are prioritised in different countries.Stakeholder consultations of some kind have historically been undertaken in all Baltic Sea countries. However, how such consultations have been undertaken, who have been invited, and the role the consultations play in relation to political decision-making differ, as shown in examples from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Poland. Because the MSP Directive is silent on how to design stakeholder consultations – it only says that they should be held – there is no political pressure on regional coordination. It is not clear from our data if these differences cause efficiency losses due to coordination deficits, but a reasonable assumption is that when, for example, marine natural resources are shared between two or more countries, jointly designed and undertaken consultations on specific transboundary issues potentially can promote transparency, understanding, and coordination.In conclusion, it is suggested that while regional coherency is often called for as a means to reduce inefficiencies, it might not be a good idea to integrate without discretion. Considering that the MSP Directive allows domestic context to matter when Member States design national MSP frameworks and that adaptation to domestic context is likely to reduce implantation gaps and increase the legitimacy of marine spatial planning, a more reasonable objective can be to embrace domestic diversity, while simultaneously adaptively promoting possibilities to solve coordination problems at lower levels, if they emerge or can be foreseen. From this perspective, increased coherence is a tool to reduce efficiency losses, rather than an intrinsic good.

Responding to calls for a more theoretically driven, post-positivist and radical marine spatial planning research that approaches the policy as a political project, this paper develops a poststructuralist discourse theory approach to critical marine spatial planning. Elaborating radical contingency as an ontological condition of social life, which points to the ineradicability of power and conflict in marine spatial planning social relations, the paper problematizes marine spatial planning as constituting politics, or key practices that attempt to organize human coexistence and thus, conceal this radical contingency. These practices (e.g. ecosystem-based management, participation, planning regulation and the organization of socio-natural spaces), whose outcomes are far from adaptive, consensual or neutral are discussed as sites of ‘politics’ that effectively marginalize particular groups of people and ‘herd’ their participation and ways of knowing toward achieving limited policy outcomes. Drawing on the EU Marine Spatial Planning Directive, the paper further teases out how specific narratives and rhetorical signifiers around ‘integrating’ and ‘balancing’ potentially irreconcilable sustainable development objectives may interpellate particular stakeholders in ways that render them ideologically complicitous in sustaining, rather than challenging, neoliberal logics of managerialism and economic maximization of marine resources. But in tune with the ontological condition of the social as radically contingent, the paper discusses how and why participatory spaces may constitute a potential space of contestation for marginalized voices and thus, reveal the political moment of marine spatial planning. Calls are made for future empirically grounded research that explores how these marine spatial planning practices are lived in both planning and extra-planning settings, and with what implications for marine protection and extant social relations of power in different marine spatial planning contexts.

This chapter develops an analytical framework, drawing on the multidimensional role of integration, to explore how the Ecosystem Approach (EA) is variously conceived and practiced in marine spatial planning (MSP) in the Baltic Sea region (BSR). This framework is used to examine how EA practices reflect differing conceptions of sustainable development (SD) in Baltic marine and coastal areas. This work intersects with several of the other chapters on marine planning in this volume by explicitly exploring links between EA and SD through examination of in-depth BSR case studies. Results reveal that EA principles for MSP developed at the international level (HELCOM/VASAB) and in some national MSP settings (e.g. Latvia), combined with a common assumption of ecological limits to development, largely acknowledge a wide definition of EA as a governance approach building on societal choice and diverse knowledge inclusion (as seen e.g. in the Malawi principles). However, looking at more specific guidelines and MSP practices, there is a significant gap between espoused principles and the practical implementation of EA in BSR MSP, especially regarding social aspects of sustainability such as participation, social inclusion and knowledge pluralism. While work on ecological services in EA looks promising as a means of developing joined-up thinking between ecological and economic interests, it is uncertain whether this approach can deliver on EA’s social sustainability ambitions. We conclude the chapter by discussing ways that could strengthen the social pillar in MSP as a form of governance to bridge the gap between EA principles and practice.