Human Rights and Ocean Governance: The Potential of Marine Spatial Planning in Europe

This book argues for the utility of human rights in the practice of ocean governance. Maritime spatial planning (MSP) has become the dominant marine management paradigm, with MSP frameworks already at various stages of elaboration and implementation in more than half of all coastal states. However, as experience with MSP accrues, a central systemic shortcoming has become apparent, insofar as the normative frameworks that underpin MSP tend to be grounded in a rationalistic and economistic worldview. The result is a post-political, neoliberal approach to the implementation of MSP, which favours technocratic ‘fixes’ to complex societal problems over efforts to address underlying issues of power and inequality. Building upon the new field of critical MSP studies, this book offers a much-neglected legal contribution. More specifically, it analyses the extent to which law, and particularly human rights law, can be utilised to meaningfully challenge the unjust patterns of human-ocean interaction that MSP preserves or creates, and so provide a vehicle for the formulation and realisation of transformative blue futures. The book looks to human rights as norms that are uniquely capable of bringing into relief the values, cause-and-effect relationships, and uncertainties that prevailing capitalist-industrial framings of the ocean tend to downplay or, worse, disregard. And so, from a more pragmatic viewpoint, the book argues that the policy and advocacy tools associated with human rights can be used within MSP processes to foster patterns of human-ocean interaction which are more conducive to social and environmental justice. This book will be of interest to legal and planning scholars, geographers, and others concerned with ocean governance and the ‘blue turn’ in the social sciences and humanities more generally.