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The importance of Policy Coherence for a better integration of marine protection in Marine Spatial Planning processes
Policy coherence can...
Help make marine spatial planning a more ecosystem-based process, whereby alignment of policies can facilitate coordination between neighbouring countries and regional approaches.
- The current Maritime Spatial Planning Directive (2014/89/EU) is process-oriented. It does, for example, require the designation of competent authorities and the establishment of marine spatial plans, but not provide substantive requirements that will ensure biodiversity protection.
- How do we ensure a proper balance between all activities and marine protection? In many Member States, the lack of substantive requirements and recognition of existing environmental legal obligations in marine spatial plans is both deteriorating commitment and trust toward marine spatial plans across sectoral state and regional authorities as well as businesses and civil society.
- The Directive leaves considerable discretion to the Member States on how to design their marine spatial plans. The result is a wide variety of marine spatial planning practices in different countries, making it difficult to apply more regional and ecosystem-based approaches to marine spatial planning.
- Policy coherence would ensure an ecosystem-based marine spatial planning. This means, amongst other things, that the planning of activities is based on the ecosystem’s geographical scope and taking the ecosystem’s resilience and functionality as the starting point for the planning of all your activities. Also, plans need to consider the legally binding marine environmental and biodiversity requirements – as well as other marine interests enjoying legal protection – as a
substantive starting point for drafting marine spatial plans. - Close coordination with neighbouring countries is necessary, but currently far too weak. A considerable degree of policy coherence and harmonisation is necessary to make such coordination possible, by ensuring the alignment of EU and member state laws, policies, institutions, mechanisms, and stakeholder involvement processes.
Contribute in making marine spatial planning processes more aligned with other plans and programs required by the EU, such as the Water Framework Directive, Marine Strategy Framework Directive, and more.
- The MSFD, the WFD and the MSP Directive are instruments that use strategic planning to coordinate across sectors. The connection between the strategic plans and the implementation in the sectors is therefore crucial.
- Incoherence between such plans may give different signals to the sectors and larger leeway for their individual interpretation of how they should act.
Mainstream biodiversity considerations more systematically across sectors and countries.
- A good and systematic integration of marine protection in MSP processes is crucial but not easy. Even when all stakeholders have nature and biodiversity high on their personal agendas, they may be constrained by their own regulatory context, governance set-ups, legal mandates, and political interests, and perhaps even trapped in path dependencies and other institutional barriers. It is key not to start on a blank slate but by first locating the legally protected uses of the sea, and then develop economic interests, such as aquaculture, around these.
- At an EU level, biodiversity is protected through the MSFD, the Habitats and Birds Directives, and the Nature Restoration Law. Yet practices across sectors are different, and mainstreaming biodiversity is not done as coherently and effectively as it should to ensure that marine protection and marine spatial planning go hand in hand.
What is needed to better integrate biodiversity in Marine Spatial Planning processes?
- Better and more effective integration of the MSP Directive with other relevant directives, particularly the MSFD.
- A revision of the MSP Directive to include substantive legal requirements on marine protection.
- Strong MSP plans that are substantively binding for all sectoral policymakers and decision makers, and that include a set of protection-related requirements that apply to all sectors coherently.
- The development of regional transboundary MSP plans. Coordination is crucial in regional seas to ensure that biodiversity is equally well protected and integrated in all sectors and boundaries.
- Invest in research towards multi-use and nature-inclusive design, and revise legislation so that there are no regulatory barriers to the implementation of nature-inclusive design in various sectors.
- More research on the role of policy coherence and how to make laws and policies, governance arrangements, institutional set-ups, and practices more coherent to serve both marine protection and systematic spatial planning that benefits nature.