Abstract
AbstractWhile 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.
Highlights
Over the last 30 years, the Brundtland’s conception of sustainable development (SD) has gained a firm place on global policy agendas
While we focused on fairness of process in the Deeping Democratic Decision-making in marine spatial planning (MSP) section above, this in insufficient, as the fairness of the distribution of resources or the relative deprivation compared with others must be part of a social sustainability agenda (Halpern et al 2013)
Even if problem representations are not reconstituted in such a dramatic way as suggested in the Polish example, this point highlights the importance of meaningful recognition and inclusion of stakeholders in thinking about what the problem is that MSP is trying to solve
Summary
Over the last 30 years, the Brundtland’s conception of sustainable development (SD) has gained a firm place on global policy agendas. Among serious criticisms pointed at MSP are that it is largely devoid of social context (Flannery et al 2018), eschews meaningful inclusion of dissenting stakeholders (Ritchie 2014), draws on limited (mostly) technical knowledge input (Ritchie and Ellis 2010; Kidd and Ellis 2012), does little to address uneven power relations among stakeholders (Ritchie and Ellis 2010; Kidd and Ellis 2012; Tafon 2017), is mostly concerned to give effect to a state agenda that privileges elite or powerful groups (Jones et al 2016; Tafon et al 2018), and lacks meaningful consideration of the distribution of the cost and benefits of marine use (Jentoft 2017; Flannery et al 2016) This omission of the social pillar across a range of issue areas has come under increasing scrutiny recently as commentators from different fields have urged for public governance to pay more attention (and give increasing priority) to redressing growing forms of inequality, rather than solely focusing on economic growth as the de facto socio-economic goal and measure of progress..
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