Transforming Land-Sea Protection and Restoration in an Era of Polycrisis

The Global Biodiversity Framework and the Nature Restoration Law of the European Union are only the last acts in a long series of international policy interventions for the protection and restoration of ecosystems around the world. This is in response to the unprecedented loss of biodiversity in many regions of the planet that includes coastal and marine ecosystems. Ecosystem degradation in marine and coastal areas will affect the health of the oceans and the well-being of coastal communities. It will also undoubtedly have negative effect on climate change, since the two crises are strictly intertwined, with cumulative impacts that are likely to intensify in the coming decades.

Global and regional policy initiatives can only be successful if they are timely and adequately implemented at the national level by sovereign states. Compliance with international policy targets, based on scientific evidence, often entails a complex process of institutional change that can generate clashes with existing policy design and practice. Legacies from the past, the presence of vested interests and episodes of policy capture have usually kept spatial management inert to change. For instance, despite the call for the inclusion of restoration measures and connection with the terrestrial environment, governance arrangements and management practices for the marine and coastal environment have rarely adopted these measures.

The paper reflects upon the reform of marine and coastal governance towards eco-scape restoration through renewed integrated spatial planning and proposes a set of recommendations for future policy action based on a selected number of cases. It does not only repropose to scholarly and political attention the debate about which governance arrangements are needed for restoration across the land-sea divide; it also proposes initial answers. The geographical scope is Europe. The coast has been traditionally an area where multiple administrative and political scales converge at the land-sea interface: the national, regional and local. In many European countries (currently 27), the EU represents an additional layer above the state, which makes the coast a clear multi-level governance system.

Based on the Horizon Europe project “BlueGreen Governance”, the papers identifies possible enablers to improve marine and coastal management along five dimensions: 1) the integration of the land and the sea under and integrated climate-smart spatial management; 2) the use of science and knowledge production in decision-making and policy development; 3) the inclusion of people’s needs and concern in co-creative efforts; 4) the adoption of foresight analysis on cumulative impacts with the aim to anticipate challenges and support forward-looking  planning; 5) reliance on e-governance tools to facilitate these transformative pathways.