Matthew Howells

Coastal communities have long been at the periphery of human geography. Nonetheless, the coasts present a rich context to understand and deconstruct processes of displacement—enclosure, ocean grabbing, gentrification, and financialization—and the salience of adjacency claims as resistance. While scholars have theorized that the coast’s spatial specificity may enable communities to raise adjacency claims, scholarship has not reconciled the degree to which coastal communities should benefit from marine resources and ocean spaces. This displacement-adjacency framework and research agenda provide a lens to study discourses, cases of contestation, and the potency of such protests of interrelated coastal displacement processes.

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.