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Short abstract:

This paper explores how Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) enacts certain human-ocean interactions as the bases for future transformations of ocean environments through an analysis of a transboundary MSP pilot project in the Gulf of Guayaquil.

Long abstract:

This paper explores how Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) enacts certain human-ocean interactions as the bases for future transformations of ocean environments. Influential global bodies have touted MSP as a key tool for addressing the rapidly declining health of the world’s oceans while simultaneously promoting oceans as sites for economic growth. MSPglobal Initiative, a project jointly funded by UNESCO and the European Commission, advocates for MSP around the world to establish future sustainable blue economies by balancing conservation with human activities through planning. MSPglobal has undertaken a transboundary pilot project in the Gulf of Guayaquil, an environmentally and economically significant portion of the Eastern Pacific Ocean located off the coasts of Ecuador and Peru. This paper examines the project’s reports and recommendations to explore how MSP makes certain relationships visible while obscuring others, and potentially creates a foundation for planning future human-ocean relationships that could reproduce environmental injustices and undermine the gulf’s long-term health. With its focus on the areal mapping of current environmental conditions and existing human activities to identify “compatibilities” and “conflicts”, MSP simplifies the three-dimensional and unstable nature of ocean environments. Moreover, MSP’s technical approach presumes that existing activities should remain in place and can co-exist if planned correctly, thus assuming that there is no apparent conflict between, for instance, aquaculture operations or hydrocarbon extraction and threatened mangrove ecologies.