Marine spatial planning (MSP) has been lauded as a remedy to unsuitable marine management. There is, however, growing MSP research illustrating that it is failing to foster paradigm shifts towards sustainable governance. The gap between MSP theory and practice is due to its asocial and apolitical implementation. This narrow version of MSP has been advanced through post-political planning and uncritical rationalities. The result is a choreographed form of MSP, with clearly defined outcomes that serve the needs of elite actors rather than the public interest. This chapter argues that to recapture its democratising potential, MSP requires explicit engagement with politics and power. We highlight the use of the boundary object lens and citizen science as two potential avenues to facilitate this engagement.
Marine spatial planning (MSP) has become the most adopted approach for sustainable marine governance. While MSP has transformative capacity, evaluations of its implementation illustrate large gaps between how it is conceptualised and how it is practiced. We argue that these gaps arise from MSP being implemented through post-political processes. Although MSP has been explored through post-political lenses, these evaluations are incomplete and do not provide sufficient detail about the complex nature of the post-political condition. Drawing on seminal literature, we conceptualise the post-political as consisting of highly interconnected modalities of depoliticisation, including: neoliberalism; choreographed participation; path dependency; technocratic-managerialism; and the illusion of progressive change. Using these modalities as an analytical framework, we evaluate English MSP and find that it focuses on entrenching neoliberal logic through: tokenistic participation; wholescale adoption of path-dependent solutions; obstructionist deployment of inactive technological solutions; and promising progressive change. We do not, however, view the post-political condition as unresolvable and we develop a suite of suggestions for the repoliticisation of MSP which, collectively, could form the basis for more radical forms of MSP.
Physical inactivity is a risk factor for numerous chronic diseases, and a mounting global health problem. It is likely that the outdoor physical environment, together with social environmental factors, has a tendency to either promote or discourage physical activity, not least in cities and other urban areas. However, the evidence base on this is sparse, making it hard to identify the best policy interventions to make, at the local or city level. This study seeks to assess the impact of one such intervention, the Connswater Community Greenway CCG), in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, UK. To do that it uses innovative methodologies, ‘Walk-along’ and ‘Cycle-along’ that involve wearable sensors and video footages, to improve our understanding of the impact of the CCG on local residents. The findings suggest that four characteristics of the CCG affect people’s activity and the benefits that the CCG created. These are physical factors, social factors, policy factors and individual factors. Each of these has many elements, with different impacts on different people using the greenway.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.