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Making room for new marine uses and safeguarding more traditional uses, without degrading the marine environment, will require the adoption of new integrated management strategies. Current management frameworks do not facilitate the integrated management of all marine activities occurring in one area. To address this issue, the government developed Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth – An Integrated Marine Plan (IMP) for Ireland. Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth presents a 'roadmap' for adopting an integrated approach to marine governance and for achieving the Government's ambitious targets for the maritime sector, including: exceeding €6.4 billion turnover annually by 2020, and doubling its contribution to GDP to 2.4% by 2030. As part of this roadmap, Harnessing Our Ocean Wealth endorses the development of an appropriate Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) Framework. One way to develop an MSP Framework is to learn from early adapters. Critical assessments of key elements of MSP as implemented in early initiatives can serve to inform the development of an appropriate framework. The aim of this project is to contribute to the development of this framework by reporting on MSP best practice relevant to Ireland. Case study selection and evaluation criteria are outlined in the next section. This is followed by a presentation of case study findings. The final section of the report focuses on outlining how the lessons could be transferred to the Irish context.

Marine spatial planning (MSP) is advanced by its champions as an impartial and rational process that can address complex management issues. We argue that MSP is not innately rational and that it problematises marine issues in specific ways, often reflecting hegemonic agendas. The illusion of impartial rationality in MSP is derived from governmentalities that appear progressive but serve elite interests. By understanding the creation of governmentalities, we can design more equitable planning processes. We conceptualise governmentalities as consisting of problematisations, rationalities and governance technologies, and assess England's first marine plans to understand how specific governmentalities de-radicalise MSP. We find that progressive framings of MSP outcomes, such as enhanced well-being, are deployed by the government to garner early support for MSP. These elements, however, become regressively problematised in later planning phases, where they are framed by the government as being difficult to achieve and are pushed into future iterations of the process. Eviscerating progressive elements from the planning process clears the way for the government to focus on implementing a neoliberal form of MSP. Efforts to foster radical MSP must pay attention to the emergence of governmentalities, how they travel through time/space and be cognisant of where difference can be inserted into planning processes. Achieving progressive MSP will require the creation of a political frontier early in the process, which cannot be passed until pathways for progressive socio-environmental outcomes have been established; advocacy for disenfranchised groups; broadening MSP evaluations to account for unintended impacts; and the monitoring of progressive objectives.

Governments are increasingly adopting Blue Growth strategies as a means of promoting economic development. Although Blue Growth offers development opportunities, from a local perspective it is often concentrated in inaccessible sectors or has negative impacts on coastal communities and landscapes. We argue that to be of use to local communities, tourist experiences of coastal landscapes need to be understood from a community-led, rather than market-led, perspective. Tourist market segmentation can help reveal such experiences but has predominately been used in a narrow, econometric way by the tourism industry, market researchers and policymakers. These approaches often fail to capture the innate experiential nature of coastal tourism and often result in the production of coastal tourism that is unsympathetic to community landscape perspectives and values. To address this gap, this paper adopts an experiential tourist segmentation approach based on community experiences of coastal landscapes. Applied to data collected from a tourist survey on the west coast of Ireland, we identify five landscape experiences: well-being experiences; conscientious travel experiences; nature experiences; coastal change experiences; and cultural experiences. Based on these experiences, four alternative tourist segments were identified, with significant alignment to communities around sustainable, ethical and locally sensitised forms of tourism, as follows: Blue Health Seekers; Nature Escapers; Pristine Seekers; and Heritage Explorers. The paper concludes by arguing that adopting more experiential and dialogical approaches to market segmentation will identify tourist and communities' perspectives in ways that are compatible and will reveal opportunities for more inclusive and locally accessible forms of Blue Growth.

There is growing concern that MSP is not facilitating a paradigm shift towards democratic marine management and that it may simply repackage old power dynamics in the rhetoric of participation. MSP has been advanced using the logic of 'rationality' and 'post-political' forms of planning that emphasise consensus and managerial-technological apparatuses for the governance of socio-political natural spaces. MSP has been described as the rational organization of the use of marine space. Rationality is, however, context dependent and the context of rationality is power. MSP processes are, therefore, arenas where specific and multiple instances of power manifests itself. MSP is also an inherently political (sensu Mouffee, 2005) process. Rather than acknowledging debate and dissensus, MSP is advanced as a neutral, participatory process that can develop win-win outcomes. The result is a choreographed form of governance and participation, with clearly defined roles, processes and acceptable outcomes, which renders invisible the politics of disagreement and legitimises the agendas of dominant actors. This chapter argues that to recapture its democratising potential, MSP requires explicit engagement with power and politics.

Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) offers the possibility of democratising management of the seas. MSP is, however, increasingly implemented as a form of post-political planning, dominated by the logic of neoliberalism, and a belief in the capacity of managerial-technological apparatuses to address complex socio-political problems, with little attention paid to issues of power and inequality. There is growing concern that MSP is not facilitating a paradigm shift towards publicly engaged marine management, and that it may simply repackage power dynamics in the rhetoric of participation to legitimise the agendas of dominant actors. This raises questions about the legitimacy and inclusivity of participatory MSP. Research on stakeholder engagement within MSP has predominately focused on assessing experiences of active MSP participants and has not evaluated the democratic or inclusive nature of these processes. Adopting the Northeast Ocean Planning initiative in the US as a case study, this paper provides the first study of exclusion and non-participation of stakeholders in an MSP process. Three major issues are found to have had an impact on exclusion and non-participation: poor communication and a perception that the process was deliberately exclusionary; issues arising from fragmented governance, territorialisation and scale; and lack of specificity regarding benefits or losses that might accrue from the process. To be effective, participatory MSP practice must: develop mechanisms that recognise the complexity of socio-spatial relationships in the marine environment; facilitate participation in meaningful spatial decision-making, rather than in post-ideological, objective-setting processes; and create space for debate about the very purpose of MSP processes.