This article contributes to the increasing traction of social justice in marine spatial planning (MSP) by exploring perceptions and experiences of social justice from the viewpoint of planners and different social groups who were included and (self)excluded in MSP processes. The study builds on empirical material from Poland, Latvia, and Germany consisting of interviews, MSP legislation, and documents that were analysed through the lens of a multidimensional social justice framework centring on recognition, representation, distribution, and capabilities. Results indicate that MSP institutional arrangements constrain possibilities for marginalised and less consolidated actor groups (residents, coastal tourism, and small-scale fisheries) to enjoy the same degree of recognition that is given to groups representing strategic national interests (renewable energy and shipping). We also highlight the role of planners’ self-reflectivity in enhancing/depriving capabilities of vulnerable social groups whose wellbeing and multidimensional relationships with the sea call for institutional responses adaptive to specific planning contexts. 

While blue justice has gained traction, recognition and capability, which are necessary conditions for procedural and distributive justice, remain under-developed. We develop a four-dimensional blue justice framework that builds on recognition and capabilities to critically examine and advance justice in Poland’s marine spatial planning (MSP). We find that misrecognition of differential identities and capacities scripted powerless stakeholders out of participation and reduced possibilities for fair distribution. Conversely, MSP regulation augmented the rights of powerful actors through granting de jure “objecting” rights to some, inviting only strategic sectors to agenda-setting fora and, limiting MSP communication to meeting legal requirements. Several stakeholders also see defence and wind energy as key winners of MSP. While society will benefit from national security and energy sufficiency, especially given Russia’s increased weaponization of energy, many believe that financial profits from wind energy will accrue to developers. We offer governmental and planning measures to enhance capabilities. 

Community participation and influence are vitally important for meeting the multidimensional sustainability aims of marine spatial planning (MSP) and more specifically for procedural and distributive justice. While participation has received substantial research interest, we identify a need to: 1) develop equity-based principles for coastal community participation that can be used to assess and reform MSP practices; 2) generate rich empirical accounts of coastal community participation and representation linked to real-world MSP practices. Here we present the results of a study that synthesizes critical MSP and blue justice scholarship to develop principles and indicators of coastally equitable and just planning. Drawing on interviews with planners and stakeholders and analysis of planning and legal documents, these principles are used to assess participatory processes linked to Latvian MSP practices in the period 2015 to 2019. Our analysis shows that equitable and just MSP needs to be based on participation that is timely, inclusive, supportive & localized, collaborative, methodical and impactful. When applied to the Latvian case these six principles provide a comprehensive and versatile heuristic approach to assess participation in MSP. In the context of Latvian MSP practices, we revealed a fundamental challenge of maintaining inclusive and localized participation throughout the full planning cycle. To counteract the successive narrowing/hardening of participatory space our results indicate a need for continuously promoting diversity of voices and perspectives, opportunities for collaborative sense making, visioning and critique. This will help to bridge diverse MSP divides (e.g., between land and sea, between local, national, and global values and priorities, between science and local knowledge, and between blue growth, conservation, and justice goals). If applied more generally in research and as part of MSP evaluation an equity-based approach can promote the mainstreaming of coastally just and equitable MSP practices. Finally, considering contextual factors (e.g., history, culture, power, legislation) that shape participation and representation is crucial when applying the equity principles to a particular MSP setting to acknowledge and accommodate its particular characteristics and challenges.

Festering ocean conflict thwarts efforts to realize the Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. This paper explores transformations of ocean conflict into situated sustainability pathways that privilege human needs, justice and equity. We first outline the promise and limits of prevailing ocean/coastal governance practices, with a focus on marine spatial planning (MSP), which by framing conflict in shallow terms as use incompatibility, supports resolution strategies that privilege neoliberal technocratic-managerial and post-political models of consensual negotiation, thereby obscuring the structural inequalities, maldistributions and misrecognitions that drive deep-seated conflicts. Next, the distinctive features of the marine realm and ocean conflict are explained. Third, we outline the root causes, drivers and scale of conflict, with reference to history, climate, culture, governance, institutions and prevailing international socio-political conditions. Fourth, we reflect on the nature of conflict, exploring implications for shallow and deeper approaches of handling conflicts. Fifth, we highlight the implications of knowledge co-production for understanding and transforming conflict in pursuit of justice. Then, in response to the orthodoxies of MSP and prevailing conflict resolution strategies, we elaborate an alternative approach – Pragmatic Agonistic co-produced Conflict Transformation (PACT) for sustainability – sketching out key elements of a praxis that seeks to transform destructive interaction patterns of conflict into co-produced, constructive, scalable and ‘institutionalizable’ yet contestable and provisional sustainability knowledge-action.

A number of commentators have argued that up until now marine/maritime spatial planning (MSP) research and practice have been dominated by blue economy and environmental concerns and have tended to neglect what might be regarded as social sustainability concerns. To gain more insight into the character and extent of such a gap, as well as how to address it, this article examines how social sustainability has been addressed in peer reviewed scientific articles on MSP between 2005 and 2020. Using search terms such as participation, democracy, social inclusion, social cohesion, equity we systematically identify and review 310 scientific articles that address diverse social sustainability concerns within MSP and marine governance. The review showed that very few papers systematically conceptualised or developed a coherent framework for engaging with social sustainability. Instead, they mostly addressed particular social concerns including participation and engagement, equity and social justice, socio-cultural values and preferences. Marine management and planning efficiency, as well as related instrumental framings of the merits of participation were the key arguments for including these dimensions of social sustainability in MSP. In terms of how to better include social sustainability in MSP, most attention was given to social-cultural mapping and ways to improve social inclusion/participation while also redressing exclusion and maldistribution of outcomes in MSP practice. We conclude that there is a need to deepen and diversify MSP inquiry with respect to social sustainability. In particular, scholars would do well to delve deeper and more broadly in social science literature to find inspiration on ways to understand and elucidate social issues. Here, the enormous body of relevant work on justice, power, critical institutionalism, political ecology and terrestrial planning literatures has hardly been tapped. It is also evident from this review that there is a need for both the academic and practice-based communities to more comprehensively address how the multidimensions of social sustainability interact with each other, as well as with economic and environmental aspects of marine planning and governance. Based on these observations, we highlight a set of suggestions on how to develop MSP research and practice on social sustainability. Most importantly, we argue that more in-depth co-production, linking scholars, practitioners and society actors, is needed. 

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.

This article elaborates a conceptual framework to examine social sustainability in marinespatial planning (MSP). Based on a critical literature review of key texts on social sustainabilityin MSP and the broader sustainable development literature we show the need to elaborate acogent and comprehensive approach for the analysis and pursuit of social sustainability linkedto the sea. We then theorize social sustainability by developing a conceptual framework throughintegrating three dimensions: Recognition, Representation and Distribution. While these three socialsustainability/justice features clearly overlap and are interdependent in practice, the conceptualthinking underpinning each of them is distinctive and when taken together they contributetowards conceiving social sustainability as a pillar of sustainability. Our approach can support ananalysis/evaluation of MSP in that, first, its broad scope and adaptability makes it suitable to examinethe wide range of claims, demands, and concerns that are likely to be encountered across dierentpractical MSP settings. Second, it acknowledges the opportunities and challenges of assessing,implementing, and achieving social justice within a broader sustainability framework.

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.

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.