With expanding human uses at sea, the objective of maritime spatial planning (MSP) to promote sustainable coexistence between marine uses becomes an increasingly challenging task. In order to assess coexistence options, both use-use interactions and use-environment interactions are important to explore. Tools for doing cumulative impact assessments (CIA) on the environment provide a means for spatially exploring environmental impacts. Finding inspiration in such ecosystem-based spatial use-environment approaches while drawing on pairwise marine use compatibility knowledge from existing literature, a spatial approach to model potential synergies and conflicts between marine uses through an expert-based scoring system is presented and implemented in SEANERGY, an ArcMap-based opensource toolbox. A test based on Baltic Sea GIS data demonstrates how SEANERGY supplements CIA analyzes with knowledge about potential use-use synergies, potential use-use conflicts, and their spatial extents, useful for optimizing the use of marine space in MSP without putting too much cumulative pressure on the environment.
Collaborative spatial decision support tools can contribute with setups for including stakeholders into marine spatial planning (MSP) processes with the purpose of increasing trust in planning outcomes, facilitate knowledge co-creation and shared planning goals, and provide transparent, scientific, inclusive, and technical foundations for planning. A new collaborative spatial decision support setup based on the combination of functionalities from two spatial decision support tools called SEANERGY and Baltic Explorer was designed for and tested in a workshop in 2020 targeted local authorities, NGOs, and citizens in Denmark with an interest in MSP. While the setup needs further testing among a wider span of stakeholders to support a pluralistic approach, the findings illustrate promising potentials from ranking conflicts and synergies in collaborative settings to make marine activity interests spatially visible in MSP and gain an overview of opportunities for sea use multi-functionality in context-based, interactive, goal-oriented stakeholder processes. The use of a visual platform such as Baltic Explorer to systematically explore locations of marine uses was positively evaluated to facilitate the workshop conflict-synergy discussions. Challenges relate to how to deal with disagreements on conflict-synergy scores and the subjectivity of opinions, but the demonstrated flexible, quick, transparent way to test the sensitivity of spatial patterns to differences in input conflict-synergy scores is found to provide a promising setup for including stakeholder opinions through collaborative settings, a setup adjustable to supplementary large-scale, individual, more representative surveys as well.
How, as a sub-set of maritime security, can piracy studies contribute with conceptual insights of relevance to the field of international security governance and international politics more broadly? To answer this question the article examines, with reference to critical intervention studies, how responses to Somali piracy have had constitutive effects, notably ‘back onto’ the intervening actors themselves. More specifically, three themes are examined: regulation (law), structures (institutions) and practices (actors), each of which highlights a distinct sense of contingency, which both characterizes contemporary security governance at sea and makes ‘the maritime’ an interesting domain for the study of constitutive effects related to the making of intervention actors. In light of this, the article argues that studying ‘the maritime’ can offer conceptual insights to the constitutive effects of counter-piracy interventions that may prove relevant to broader debates about governance and security in a changing world order.
For the EU's Common Fisheries Policy, solving the discard problem is a central issue. Through a study of the institutional set-up and initiatives to solve the discard problem in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Norway, the article identifies the discard problem as related to natural and other material conditions as well as cultural conditions. Therefore, solving the discard problem requires not only technical and regulatory instruments, but also arenas and structures that allow and support cultural change processes.
This paper centers local processes for co-creating transitions towards more sustainable, inclusive, and resilient coastal community development. We have conceptualized a path for change processes with phases of transition including 1. Reasons to convene; 2. Governance and participation "rules"; 3. Building knowledge together; 4. Implementation and experimentation; 5. Post-hoc reflections and assessment; 6. Transfer/reproduction of practices. Here, we focus on the first three stepping stones, which form the foundation of the collaborative process, focusing on the challenges and opportunities encountered as a pilot intervention is planned. We use a framework informed by partnership-, co-creation-, transition-, and justice literatures, to analyze data focused on establishing partnerships for ongoing co-creation of knowledge, empowering actors in the local communities, and selecting options for an intervention pilot. Conclusions relate to (a) trust and preexisting relationships, (b) what inclusion means, (c) internal power differentials, (d) preexisting tensions in the community, (e) challenges to co-creation.
Illicit maritime activities generate significant scholarly and policy attention. While diverse in nature, governance responses share many regulatory features. This introduction advances the notion of maritime justice, a socio‐legal research agenda. Different from broader maritime security studies, it places law at the centre of the inquiry, studying maritime governance practices through the lens of regulation. Empirically, it covers operational, spatial, and structural junctions between illicit maritime activity and regulatory responses deriving from international and domestic law. Analytically, it is heterogeneous but holds a methodological commitment to studying everyday law enforcement practices of maritime security governance to disentangle its meanings and effects. The introduction posits the junction between illicit maritime activities and regulatory responses as a productive space to study the varied norms that shape order‐making at sea, and vice versa.
Sensing data from vessel operations are of great importance in reflecting operational performance and facilitating proper decision-making. In this paper, statistical analyses of vessel operational data are first conducted to compare manual noon reports and autolog data from sensors. Then, new indicators to identify data aberrations are proposed, which are the errors between the reported values from operational data and the expected values of different parameters based on baseline models and relevant sailing conditions. A method to detect aberrations based on the new indicators in terms of the reported power is then investigated, as there are two independent measured power values. In this method, a sliding window that moves forward along time is implemented, and the coefficient of variation (CV) is calculated for comparison. Case studies are carried out to detect aberrations in autolog and noon data from a commercial vessel using the new indicator. An analysis to explore the source of the deviation is also conducted, aiming to find the most reliable value in operations. The method is shown to be effective for practical use in detecting aberrations, having been initially tested on both autolog and noon report from four different commercial vessels in 14 vessel years. Approximately one triggered period per vessel per year with a conclusive deviation source is diagnosed by the proposed method. The investigation of this research will facilitate a better evaluation of operational performance, which is beneficial to both the vessel operators and crew.
Any ecosystem based fisheries management system is necessarily faced with the problem of multiple objectives that trade-off against one another. Typically, objectives such as the maximization of yield, employment or profit or minimizing environmental impacts will be optimized in different parts of the decision space, which is formed of the fishing mortality rates that can be applied to the various species, given the constraints imposed by the mixed species nature of many fishing fleets. Since objectives cannot be simultaneously achieved, managers need to consider how such objectives trade-off against one another in order to choose a balanced strategy. Normally, they also have to consider the views of different groupings of stakeholders, who often favour widely different and conflicting objectives. This is particularly difficult if stakeholders are reluctant to expose their negotiating positions. This article explores two possible approaches to developing a Decision Support Framework for the North Sea. The first is a classic Multi- Criteria Analysis (MCA) approach that was developed in cooperation with North Sea stakeholders. The implementation went smoothly for the definition of suitable scenarios, decision trees and criteria, but failed in facilitating consensus on how to set priorities at the stakeholder level. However, it remains a possible approach for higher level management to adopt. Consequently, to aid effective decision-making a simpler approach was designed to visualise stakeholders concerns both to themselves and to the managers in charge of actual decision-making. Rather than trying to achieve some joint optima of the objectives that stakeholders wish to achieve this approach seeks to avoid the solutions various stakeholder groups resent the most. This ‘N dimensional potato approach’ proposed here treats the decision space as analogous to a partially rotten potato that has to be prepared for the table: each group of stakeholders cut away those parts of the decision space that they consider unacceptable. Ideally, this would leave a decision space where somewhat acceptable compromise solutions exist. But, if no decision space is left after all have made their cuts, this approach will still inform managers about the consequences of different solutions in terms of which group will be disappointed and by how much. Making this approach operational requires both uncovering various stakeholders’ views of the unacceptable areas, and also displaying these areas in a convenient fashion together with areas of stakeholder consent. The article describes the steps taken to address these two tasks by the North Sea case study of the MareFrame research project.
This article examines whether the concept of territorial governance (TG) accurately captures the nature of governance and policymaking in transboundary marine spatial planning (TMSP) activities in the Baltic Sea Region. The focus of analysis is on the DG Mare–funded Baltic SCOPE and Pan Baltic Scope projects, which brought together key marine spatial planning stakeholders in the Baltic Sea Region to find solutions to TMSP issues. The five key dimensions of TG are examined against the transboundary collaborations undertaken during these two projects. The article finds that TMSP in the Baltic Sea Region shares many of the key characteristics of TG, such as, promoting learning and establishing stronger links between institutions, sectors and stakeholders; however, the TG concept fails to accurately capture the power dynamics at play in TMSP, particularly the central role of national planning authorities and certain sea use sectors in determining the overall direction of policy.
Ocean monitoring will improve outcomes if ways of knowing and priorities from a range of interest groups are successfully integrated. Coastal Indigenous communities hold unique knowledge of the ocean gathered through many generations of inter-dependent living with marine ecosystems. Experiences and observations from living within that system have generated ongoing local and traditional ecological knowledge (LEK and TEK) and Indigenous knowledge (IK) upon which localized sustainable management strategies have been based. Consequently, a comprehensive approach to ocean monitoring should connect academic practices (“science”) and local community and Indigenous practices, encompassing “TEK, LEK, and IK.” This paper recommends research approaches and methods for connecting scientists, local communities, and IK holders and their respective knowledge systems, and priorities, to help improve marine ecosystem management. Case studies from Canada and New Zealand (NZ) highlight the emerging recognition of IK systems in natural resource management, policy and economic development. The in-depth case studies from Ocean Networks Canada (ONC) and the new Moana Project, NZ highlight real-world experiences connecting IK with scientific monitoring programs. Trial-tested recommendations for successful collaboration include practices for two-way knowledge sharing between scientists and communities, co-development of funding proposals, project plans and educational resources, mutually agreed installation of monitoring equipment, and ongoing sharing of data and research results. We recommend that future ocean monitoring research be conducted using cross-cultural and/or transdisciplinary approaches. Vast oceans and relatively limited monitoring data coupled with the urgency of a changing climate emphasize the need for all eyes possible providing new data and insights. Community members and ocean monitoring scientists in joint research teams are essential for increasing ocean information using diverse methods compared with previous scientific research. Research partnerships can also ensure impactful outcomes through improved understanding of community needs and priorities.