Paulina Ramírez-Monsalve

Engagement of local communities and policy coherence across different sectors are essential to ensure that no one is left behind in the green transition. Coastal communities face many challenges that are difficult to adapt to, including those associated with blue growth. In this article, outcomes from two Horizon Europe projects were used to explore barriers to applying the Leave No One Behind (LNOB) principle. A policy coherence framework was applied to assess the level of coherence between policies identified to create conflicts and disempowerment in an Eastern Limassol case study. The coastal community is industrialised yet still supports a diversity of habitats and endangered species. The region is subject to multiple, overlapping EU policy streams, creating policy incoherence and local tensions. The article highlights the blue economy as a paradigm that inevitably will lead to conflicts between ecological, social, and economic priorities, and how the LNOB principle can be essential in bringing these together in a holistic approach. However, there are several limitations to the principle’s applicability in the current policy landscape. The main mechanism for equitable transition in the blue economy, the Just Transition, is not applicable under many circumstances, leaving no strict legal framework for implementation of equity and equality in the transition of coastal areas. The mainstream understanding of the blue economy is still dominated by the hope of win-win-win scenarios with limited transparency about the trade-offs and conflicts at stake, and few mechanisms that offer legal consequences.

Denmark is currently producing their first Maritime Spatial Plan, as required by the European Union’s Maritime Spatial Planning Directive 2014/89. This article investigates the Danish approach to governing land-sea interactions, exploring the impacts of various institutional and procedural factors on the practice of planning at the land-sea interface in Denmark. We find that in Denmark, the MSP process has priority over the terrestrial planning system, that there is a complex institutional set-up with a lack of integration between the maritime and terrestrial planning systems, and that there exist differing perspectives about the importance of certain industries leading to conflicts.

A new motivation for marine restoration has been observed, associated with the dissatisfaction with current marine restoration governance arrangements (MRGAs). An MRGA consists of alliances of public and private actors (coalitions) who, through their common conceptualisation of the problem (discourses), try to influence and design marine restoration activities while considering the rules of decision‐making, and the management of limited resources. Emerging MRGAs rise in parallel to existing ones and aim to contribute to the same goals or show another way of reaching those goals. This phenomenon raises questions of legitimacy both for the emerging and the existing arrangement. Building on existing literature, this paper proposes an analytical framework to simultaneously explore input, throughput and output legitimacy as three essential pre‐conditions of legitimacy for MRGAs. The framework is tested in three European cases of MRGAs that were part of the European Union MERCES project (http://www.merces-project.eu/). Analysis showed that actors who are influential in achieving restoration goals, and also those who are impacted by restoration actions, should be involved in the MRGAs (input legitimacy); actors within MRGAs should establish and follow procedures for decision‐making that are both transparent and clear (throughput legitimacy); and actors within MRGAs need to establish a common understanding of restoration, of the goal to reach and of the related uncertainties (output legitimacy). Awareness of these pre‐conditions allows actors internal and external to MRGAs to address aspects that give legitimacy to restoration actions. It also creates a language that allows actors to engage in discussion on legitimacy that goes beyond the mere application of the rule of law.

In the North Sea, many oil and gas fields will reach the end of their productivity and their associated structures will be decommissioned. OSPAR decision 98/3 prescribes removal of all disused offshore structures as the only acceptable decommissioning option. This policy is the legacy of the 1995 Brent Spar incident, which resulted in the current dominant discourse of ‘Hands off the Oceans,’ ruling out the conversion of oil and gas rigs into artificial reefs (Rigs-to-Reefs (RtR)). The shift from a conservation to a restoration paradigm could open up the RtR debate. In this paper, a discourse analysis is carried out to discern whether and how ideas about RtR and ecosystem restoration are articulated to challenge the dominant ‘Hands off the Oceans’ discourse and thereby bring about change in North Sea decommissioning policy. A discourse analytic framework is applied to elucidate whether an ‘RtR as Restoration’ discourse can be distinguished and how competing claims are presented in the various storylines. Our analysis shows an ‘RtR as Restoration’ discourse, consisting of four different storylines. Given the fragmented nature of this discourse, the ‘RtR as Restoration’ discourse will not overcome the dominant ‘Hands off the Oceans’ discourse.

The International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES) occupies a central role in the advice system to support the implementation of an ecosystem approach to fisheries management (EAFM) in the European Union (EU). Despite improvements, its capacity to deliver ecosystem advice seems to be far from a fully functional operational framework. To what extent availability of appropriate scientific advice is a barrier for a more widespread use of an EAFM in Europe remains an open question. Building on the findings of a large research project, this article explores what advice ICES can provide. The article concludes that: (i) ICES has taken a leading role in generating an EAFM framework in which management decisions can operate; (ii) the advice “suppliers” and the advice “users” agree on the feasibility of using existing knowledge to “do EAFM now”; (iii) ICES can address a range of shortcomings, but some of the present bottlenecks demand concerted action between the advisory system and the political realm. The implementation of an EAFM requires consistency between science and management. ICES appears as well-suited to facilitate the dialogue on applying an EAFM in the EU, but it is unrealistic to expect ICES to produce all the answers.