From the Forest to the Sea – Public Lands Management and Marine Spatial Planning

Morgan Gopnik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138014428
• eBook ISBN: 9781317745426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

The management of common pool resources and publicly-owned areas is fraught with difficulty. This book explores the long, complex, and frequently contentious history of public lands management in the United States in order to draw lessons for the emerging field of marine spatial planning (MSP).

The author first establishes that these two seemingly different settings are in fact remarkably similar, drawing on established theories of policy analysis. The work then examines the management of US National Forests over the past 120 years, including three place-based case studies, to discover recurring themes. The analysis shows how different management approaches evolved over time in response to changing laws and cultural norms, producing outcomes favored by different constituencies. This history also reveals the ambiguities and contradictions inherent in multiple-use management of any public space. Next, the book analyzes recent efforts to advance MSP, both in the US and globally, showing how they mirror past experiences in National Forest management, including similar disagreements among stakeholders.

In conclusion the author suggests how those within ocean-related sectors – government, academia, industry, and environmental groups – might achieve their individual and collective goals more effectively based on lessons from the public lands setting.

1
Introduction

From "untamable" to regulated seas

Although ocean waters cover over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, the governance and management of this space is in its infancy compared to that on land. For most of recorded history, people have viewed the ocean as “wild, unruly, and untamable” (Steinberg 2001), considering it “a source of inexhaustible resources, the use of which need not be restricted” (Orbach 2003). Gradually, as technology advanced and oceans became more accessible, people began to occupy this space and exploit its resources to ever greater extents. This in turn led to expanding efforts by nations to control access to ocean space and the use of its resources (Russ and Zeller 2003). By the middle of the 20th century, ocean waters were home to intensive nearshore recreational activities, large international fishing operations, ever-deeper offshore oil extraction, and a tangle of commercial and military ship routes, while ocean management remained relatively weak and Balkanized by sector.

Through the end of the millennium, single-issue ocean laws and programs multiplied while the scientific study of marine ecosystems became more sophisticated. Problems such as declining fish stocks, the loss of large predators, changes in marine biodiversity, marine debris, endangered species, coastal habitat loss, hypoxic “dead zones,” and ocean acidification became increasingly evident, as documented in multiplying scientific publications (e.g., NRC 1990; Gray 1997; Pauly et al. 1998; and Rabalais and Turner 2013, among many others) and disseminated to broader audiences in reports from highly regarded sources such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005, Chs. 18 and 19) and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (USCOP 2004a). Explanations for the declines in ocean health pointed to human behavior as the major culprit, highlighting the impacts of overfishing, coastal development, point and non-point source pollution, and climate change. In response, spokespeople, activists, and new organizations emerged to publicize and combat these problems, using time-tested advocacy tools such as media campaigns, grassroots organizing, political lobbying, lawsuits, and public education.

The solutions proposed varied from tighter regulation and better enforcement (e.g., Graham and Reilly 2011), to market mechanisms (e.g., Wilen 2000), community-based management (e.g., Jentoft 2000), marine protected areas (e.g., NRC 2001), and more. Marine ecosystem-based management (EBM), defined in a consensus statement as “an integrated approach to management that considers the entire ecosystem, including humans” (COMPASS 2005), has been frequently advanced as a more effective approach for managing complex and highly interconnected marine ecosystems (e.g., McLeod and Leslie 2009). However, despite several attempts to articulate the necessary elements of EBM, widely disparate programs have been labeled as such, including the California Marine Life Protection Act process, the Great Barrier Reef re-zoning project, the U.S. National Marine Sanctuaries Program, and other efforts that share little more than their commitment to being more holistic than traditional management (Arkema et al. 2006). An ambitious, collaborative project recently analyzed marine EBM efforts around the world,¹ summarizing many of their common features and suggesting lessons learned, although it is likely to take some time for these lessons to be confirmed and to make their way into practice.

A different approach: marine spatial planning²

One approach that was advanced sporadically over the years, but gained little traction, suggested that comprehensive, multiple-use planning of ocean space would help in coping with the complexities of marine ecosystems and human uses (see Young and Fricke 1975; Knecht and Kitsos 1984; Juda and Burroughs 1990). Almost forty years ago, Young and Fricke wrote:

Sea use planning, we believe, is a necessary intellectual tool … to seize hold of some of the problems that so far have been too slippery … Because of the multiplicity of competitive, and potentially damaging uses, sea use now needs to be ordered and controlled … in the interests of the community as a whole.

The writings of these authors seem prescient in light of recent developments.

By the start of the 21st century, the call for planning in the marine environment—which has gone by many names in its brief life, including ocean zoning, ocean planning, maritime spatial planning, sea-use planning, area-based ocean management, and marine spatial planning (MSP)—was being actively taken up in a number of countries (Rothwell and VanderZwaag 2006; Douvere and Ehler 2009). The most widely cited definition of MSP describes it as “a public process of analyzing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic, and social objectives” (Ehler and Douvere 2009), but the term has been used to describe a wide range of management activities in the ocean, from siting marine protected areas to regional fisheries management, that fail to meet all those criteria. A more general definition is offered in a report to the United Nations’ Global Environment Facility: “MSP is a framework which provides a means for improving decision-making as it relates to the use of marine resources and space. It is based on principles of the ecosystem approach and ecosystem-based management” (GEF 2012).

Although Australia had undertaken spatial planning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park for decades—and many MSP proponents point to their approach as a model—that effort was driven primarily by a marine conservation mission rather than being propelled by an integrated, multiple-use perspective. Experiments and pilot projects in “true” MSP were conducted in the early 2000s in Ireland, Belgium, and Canada. One study of the genesis of MSP (Merrie and Olsson 2014) found that a relatively small group of individuals, embedded in formal and informal networks, were key to framing MSP as a solution and promoting its spread around the world. The process started with a National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis Working Group that met four times in 2005 and 2006 and published an influential article in Science magazine (Crowder et al. 2006). That article summarized growing concerns about marine ecosystems worldwide and stated the authors’ belief that “marine spatial planning with comprehensive ocean zoning can help address these problems.” In November of that year, with partial funding from the California-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation,³ the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) hosted the first international meeting devoted to the developing theory and practice of MSP. The forty-nine attendees included academics and practitioners from seventeen countries, including twelve Americans, and the resulting workshop report is considered by many to have put MSP on the map (Ehler and Douvere 2007). Dozens of countries around the world are currently engaged in some version of MSP, as discussed further in Chapter 8.

In the U.S. the adoption of MSP moved more slowly. In 2004, after three years of public hearings, research, and deliberations, a blue-ribbon commission issued a report (USCOP 2004a) that highlighted the need for greater agency coordination and regional flexibility in U.S. ocean management. In particular, Recommendation 6.2 stated that “Congress … should establish a balanced, ecosystem-based offshore management regime that sets forth guiding principles for the coordination of offshore activities.” At the time of the USCOP’s deliberations, the relatively new term “marine spatial planning” was not well established in U.S. policy circles and does not appear anywhere in the final report. Nevertheless, Recommendation 6.2, and the reasoning behind it, foreshadowed events to come.

In early 2007, an informal poll was conducted at a meeting of U.S. ocean policy experts hosted by the Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C. Predictions for when MSP might be implemented in the U.S. ranged from eight to twenty years, with an average of around twelve years.⁴ Participants saw few economic drivers and little political support for such an approach to be adopted in the U.S. at that time. Yet only two years later, in 2009, Massachusetts had prepared an Ocean Plan for its waters, Rhode Island and Oregon had similar plans underway, and a Presidential Memorandum had directed an interagency taskforce to develop a national “framework for effective coastal and marine spatial planning” (White House 2009). To top off this eventful year, the December 2009 issue of Scientific American included MSP as one of its twenty “World Changing Ideas.” As of this writing, active steps are being taken in Washington, D.C. and nine regions around the country to launch marine planning efforts, looking largely to MSP implementation in Europe and elsewhere for justification, guidance, and models. This is a remarkable pace for embracing a significant new policy direction—in ocean management or any other area—based on little track record and scant national dialogue.

Looking critically at marine spatial planning

Not everyone has embraced MSP as a desirable next step in ocean management. Some ocean industry sectors, particularly offshore oil and gas and international shipping, worry that MSP “could create uncertainty and harm economic activity” and that “the policy is being developed without adequate congressional engagement and consideration of the views of ocean, coastal, Great Lakes, and inland user groups, including commercial and recreational interests” (NOPC 2012). A series of workshops organized by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions brought together a broad array of ocean users who expressed similar concerns, albeit with greater optimism that they might be overcome (Gopnik et al. 2012). The U.S. House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee has held a number of hearings highly critical of this new direction in ocean policy,⁵ and released a number of disparaging—and not entirely accurate—factsheets and press releases deploring its adoption (e.g., House Resources Committee 2011). Groups representing fishermen decry efforts that might reduce their access to ocean waters (e.g., RFA 2009; CCA 2012), and a conservative website ominously speculates that: “CMSP has the potential for the greatest encroachment on private property rights we have ever faced in this nation … CMSP has the potential for turning over control of commercial and recreational fishing to the United Nations” (Beaufort Observer 2012).

Even groups that are generally supportive of MSP worry that their constituencies’ concerns may not be given sufficient weight. For example, public comments on a proposed federal framework for MSP reveal that environmental advocates believe that ecosystem protection, including the siting of additional marine protected areas, should trump economic goals, while renewable energy advocates worry that any new planning process might interfere with their ongoing efforts to obtain permits for offshore facilities. But beyond such sector-specific concerns, more fundamental questions arise:

• Is MSP being oversold, as the overarching solution to ocean governance problems? Public policy scholars warn against the "perverse and extensive use of policy panaceas in misguided efforts to make ... human-environment systems sustainable" and "the danger of blueprint approaches to die governance of tough social-ecological problems" (Ostrom 2007). Ostrom recommends instead adopting a more analytic, diagnostic approach, whereby each situation is treated as a unique combination of human and ecological variables necessitating uniquely designed solutions. Already, some observers have suggested that die focus on MSP is stealing attention away from more specific problems and more targeted solutions (e.g., Spalding 2011).
• Might, MSP be undermined by the common pitfalls of centralized, technocratic approaches? James Scott's landmark studies of projects as diverse as Prussian forestry, Soviet collective farms, and die design of Brazil's capital city, Brasilia, provide ample lessons about the perils of large, centralized, "scientific" government projects that fail to perceive or allow for human psychology and pre-existing social patterns (Scott 1998). These cautionary tales raise concerns about whether rapid, nationwide implementation of MSP based on a federal framework might override existing, functional policy systems and decrease management experimentation at local and regional scales.
• Can experience with MSP implementation in other countries serve as a valid model for U.S. practice? As MSP moves forward in die U.S., managers have primarily relied on lessons learned in otiier countries. However, a substantial body of research, coming largely out of die international development community, has explored die limitations associated witii transferring seemingly successful policy approaches from one country to another (e.g., Rose 1991; Bennett and Howlett 1992; Dolowitz and Marsh 1996; de Jong et al. 2002). Existing "guides" to MSP, based on experiences in Europe, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere (e.g., Ehler and Douvere 2009), may not be fully applicable in the very different U.S. context where tiiere is a history of strong private property rights and individual freedoms, and substantial mistrust of government programs, federal mandates, and the very notion of central planning.

To reconcile the promise and potential pitfalls of MSP and achieve a realistic assessment of its likely outcomes, MSP needs to be examined in a critical light, using the available tools and accumulated wisdom of policy analysts and natural resource governance scholars, informed by appropriate historical perspective. Unfortunately, much of the current thinking and writing on ocean policy, notably including the two recent commission reports (Pew Oceans Commission 2003 and USCOP 2004a), does not provide such links between theory and practice (Duff 2004). In fact, Kidd and Ellis observe that MSP’s “core concepts and assumptions … have not been subject to rigorous intellectual debate” (Kidd and Ellis 2012).

Exploring marine spatial planning through a different lens

Proponents of MSP frequently explain it to new audiences using analogies to the more familiar and widespread practice of urban land-use planning (e.g., Tyldesley and Hunt 2003; Gopnik 2008; Agardy 2010). Although this has proved helpful in conveying the general concept to lay audiences, the analogy is fundamentally flawed. Land-use plans guide the use of property—largely privately owned—in densely populated areas to achieve certain economic and quality-of-life goals typically determined through a political process. These conditions are far different from those in the ocean. Within 200 miles of shore, with few exceptions, the unpopulated ocean and its resources are already considered a public good, to be managed by national governments for the welfare of their citizens (Turnipseed et al. 2010). Thus, a more promising avenue might be to compare ocean planning and management to that undertaken for other common-pool resources—such as public land and certain government services—that have been more thoroughly studied. As explained by Duff (2004): “Ocean areas are public space. As a result, the more apt models that ought to be considered in assessing ocean space/resource management issues are those models that have been employed to manage other public areas and resources” (emphasis added).

The purpose of this book and the research on which it is based is to place ocean management, and MSP particularly, within the broader context of research and practice in fields such as policy analysis, common-pool resource theory, institutional analysis, planning and design, community engagement, and conflict resolution, and to look at the history of U.S. public lands management as a promising comparative model. In preliminary interviews, individuals who had experience in only one of land or ocean management were very resistant to the idea that the two systems might be compared. They focused, instead, on elements that seemed different and foreign to them, hardly able to imagine what a landscape of mountains, streams, and forests, with its associated communities of loggers, hikers, and hunters, might have in common with beaches, coral reefs, and wide-open waters plied by surfers, boaters, fishermen, and container ships. However, a handful of individuals who had substantial experience in both settings jumped at the suggestion of simila...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• Preface
• List of acronyms
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Public land/public ocean
• 3 Is the exclusive economic zone like public lands?
• 4 The story of the U.S. National Forest system
• 5 Pacific Northwest Forests: Case Study #1
• 6 An Eastern Forest: Case Study #2
• 7 Learning from forest experiences
• 8 Back at the shore: lessons for the ocean community
• References
• Index