Abstract
Marine and coastal activities are closely interrelated, and conflicts among different sectors can undermine management and conservation objectives. Governance systems for fisheries, power generation, irrigation, aquaculture, marine biodiversity conservation, and other coastal and maritime activities are typically organized to manage conflicts within sectors, rather than across them. Based on the discussions around eight case studies presented at a workshop held in Brest in June 2019, this paper explores institutional approaches to move beyond managing conflicts within a sector. We primarily focus on cases where the groups and sectors involved are heterogeneous in terms of: the jurisdiction they fall under; their objectives; and the way they value ecosystem services. The paper first presents a synthesis of frameworks for understanding and managing cross-sectoral governance conflicts, drawing from social and natural sciences. We highlight commonalities but also conceptual differences across disciplines to address these issues. We then propose a novel analytical framework which we used to evaluate the eight case studies. Based on the main lessons learned from case studies, we then discuss the feasibility and key determinants of stakeholder collaboration as well as compensation and incentive schemes. The discussion concludes with future research needs to support policy development and inform integrated institutional regimes that consider the diversity of stakeholder interests and the potential benefits of cross-sectoral coordination.
Highlights
Human activities can have severe negative impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems, leading to loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [MEA], 2005)
1With regards to the categorization of conflict intensity, with a gradient from verbal disagreements to military acts as defined in Spijkers et al (2018), the conflicts we focus on are typically those of lower intensity, i.e., non-violent phenomena such as verbal discords or legal proceedings resulting from differing interests. 2This paper is primarily focused on addressing negative externalities
Ostrom-type approaches, which are broadly focused on cooperative management and collective-choice rules, and Coasean bargaining, which involves exchanges of some form of property rights or regulatory benefits between groups, both delegate more responsibilities to stakeholders who have more practical knowledge than managers or politicians to implement actions
Summary
Human activities can have severe negative impacts on marine and coastal ecosystems, leading to loss of biodiversity and degradation of ecosystem services (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [MEA], 2005). Cross-sectoral conflicts typically involve heterogeneous stakeholder groups with different value systems, conflicting aims and views of the management problem, different objectives or priorities, different knowledge bases, and disagreement regarding the allocation of the costs and benefits associated with proposed solutions (Adams et al, 2003; Crowder et al, 2006; Redpath et al, 2013). These conflicts are often society-wide problems, and the goal of governance regimes addressing them cannot focus solely on a particular group of resource users. These governance conflicts are not necessarily limited to spatial conflicts, but can relate to tradeoffs and fundamentally different perceptions of resource values among diverse user groups
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