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Abstract Activities in the North Sea are intensifying. The European Union instructs maritime spatial planning across member states that motivates coordination of activities, stakeholders, policies, governance levels and nations. Social innovation is a concept addressing ways in which changing attitudes, behaviour or perceptions are leading to new and improved ways of acting jointly within a group and beyond. The main aim of this article is to explore social innovation in maritime spatial planning. Instances of social innovation are assessed across three sectors in the Dutch North Sea: the offshore wind energy, the offshore mussel cultivation and the offshore seaweed farming. The assessment shows that, while existing systems of social innovation are favourable to the offshore wind expansions, the barriers to grow for the offshore mussel sector include low willingness to change within the sector, and disadvantageous governmental support to change. The offshore seaweed farming is in a stage of re-organisation of not yet developed regulations, rules and norms for production offshore and enhanced cooperation, with unsure outcomes. Maritime spatial planning can play a more influential role for change if tackling main challenges, including inclusiveness, accountability, private user rights and realisation of organisation or reorganisation, and if making use of the potentials of knowledge brokers when sectors are advancing with new technologies. Highlights • Maritime Spatial Plans (MSP) can contribute to smart, inclusive and sustainable growth. • Social innovation can encourage sector integration and cooperation. • If tackling challenges of inclusiveness and accountability, MSP can be more influential. • If using the potentials of knowledge brokers, MSP can enhance social innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union has launched the Blue growth concept as a strategy for stimulating economic growth in European seas. It is accompanying the core principles of the Green growth paradigm that seek to stimulate smart, sustainable and inclusive growth of economic activities. Focusing on Blue growth, this article examines its adequacy to enable social innovation as a strategy for the use and management of marine resources. Social innovation is interpreted as the changing behaviour of a group of actors joined in a network, leading to new and improved ways of collaborative action within the group and beyond. Social innovation can contribute to changing behaviour across different institutional settings, across markets and public sectors, and to enhancing bottom-up responsible inventiveness towards integration of social, economic and environmental objectives. Based on case-study research it is concluded that, to secure long-term sustainable development over short-term benefits, a social innovation perspective in the maritime domain will depend on cooperation, inclusiveness and trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informational governance is a relatively new analytical concept explaining societal changes appearing in the Information Age, resulting from the massive new patterns of information flows. The main aim of this review is to identify the emerging issues in this new interdisciplinary field of science, within the context of environmental sustainability. Besides the existing literature on informational governance, new scientific contributions provided by this special issue are reviewed. The informational governance concept particularly contributes to analysing the rationale of the new patterns of information flows into the governance literature, and to gaining insights in how and why actors and institutions see their authorities being transformed into new arrangements. On the basis of the contributions to this special issue we specify future research topics in areas: information construction in policy processes, new relationships, transparency implications in environmental governance, new global arrangements and public engagement in the Information Age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informational governance refers to a societal transformation caused by information generation, processing, transmission and use in the domain of environmental governance. If information has a transformative capacity for the society as whole, then transformation will also affect the role of citizens. This article addresses the potential of citizen cooperation to foster environmental sustainability. It does not deal more specifically with the numerous potential pitfalls and downsides of greater citizen influence — and obstacles to citizens playing a positive role in environmental governance in the Information Age. The aim of this article is to outline four potential roles of citizens in the domain of environmental governance in the Information Age. We base our analysis on two dimensions. First we use the case of regionalization to reflect on the transformative influence of information on a citizen's role. Second, we use the case of cooperation in which we distinguish between individual and group level. In this article, we address the case of citizens and their incentives to adopt cooperative behaviour through these processes. The outcome of our analysis is the specification of four citizens’ regionalization scenarios, in which citizens take on the respective roles of a global or local strategist, or a global or local co-operator. We conclude that these different potential roles of citizens in environmental governance in the Information Age have been underestimated to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informational governance is an analytical concept that addresses the role of recent rapidly increasing information activities in governance processes and institutions. Scientific information no longer has the status as the only source of relevant information in organizational and public decision making. Instead, the Information Age provides new opportunities for the influence of bottom-up information stemming from various stakeholders. In this article, the main aim is to explore the relevant conditions for potential stakeholders to influence environmental governance processes. We do so by focusing on the specific case of fishers’ information in fisheries governance. The review, which includes research from across the globe but pays particular attention to recent developments in Europe, shows that fishers’ information can contribute to scientific information, and that co-creation of information with scientists can be useful in fisheries governance. Still, integration of scientific and fishers’ information remains complicated. We conclude that successful integration of the two types of information fully depends on one context dependent factor, namely trust. The conditions facilitating development of trust in environmental governance are recommended as core themes for future research on informational governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid developments in all kinds of new information technologies, information networks and social media are increasingly affecting societies around the world. The so termed Information Age not only influences social relationships, economy and science, but also governance. Against this background and in the specific field of sustainability, informational governance is an emerging concept. It addresses two interrelated processes: (1) new forms of governing through information, and (2) transformative changes in governance institutions due to the new information flows. The aim of this article is to gain more insights into ways in which the Information Age impacts sustainability, and to suggest a research agenda with relevance to the field of informational governance. A systematic literature review resulted in a selection of 39 articles, of which 23 and 16 articles were identified in two-parallel searches. The increased human interconnectedness through e-governance, self-organization, private governing and empowerments are identified as core informational governance trends dealing with sustainability in the Information Age, and essential to future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we address social acceptance in marine governance. Public support and opposition are critical to any future developments of marine areas, and are often neglected aspects. Whilst one of the main new developments in European marine areas is the increase in sites for offshore wind, social acceptance of renewable energy developments in Europe is shown to be low in a series of on-going studies. There is perhaps often a sense that renewables such as wind, wave and tidal will be 'out of sight, out of mind' when developed offshore but the empirical research evidence from across Europe suggests otherwise. People are protesting against offshore wind, and doing so very effectively, preventing and delaying the development of projects. This article articulates the term ‘social acceptance’ as a goal in marine policy implementation in European waters in general, and provides illustrations of the implications of social acceptance of offshore wind in a series of case studies. The experiences of social acceptance, together with theoretical insights, should be taken into account in future innovations for blue energy at sea, including the wind farms, but also wave and tidal devices and other technological developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marine governance is challenged by complex situations at regional seas and coastal areas of European countries where multiple stakeholder interests and numerous management options have to be balanced. In these situations an improved understanding of marine governance is crucial for ensuring sustainable development at sea. The main aim of this synthesis article is to increase present understanding of processes of regionalization in EU marine governance based on the contributions in this special issue. Regionalization is defined as the integration and cooperation of maritime activities, policies and actors at the level of the regional seas. The contributions in this special issue analyse processes of regionalization within different maritime sectors from a diversity of social scientific disciplines to unravel different forms and types of regionalization in marine governance. The main finding is that there is still a relatively large mismatch between the vision on ecosystem-based management expressed in EU marine policies and the implementation of EBM within sectoral maritime activities. A reduction of such a gap between EU marine policies and sectoral management fully depends on efforts at regional level to coordinate and to integrate the different sector policy processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New EU policy initiatives within the Maritime Strategy Framework Directive, the Integrated Maritime Policy, the reform of the Common Fisheries Policy, the offshore Energy policy and the Blue Growth Strategy, are in different manners aiming at implementing Ecosystem Based Management (EBM). EBM focuses on regional areas, as opposed to traditional sectoral driven policy approaches, aiming for integrated planning and coherent management. Understanding how regionalization processes work to enhance legitimate and responsible governance leading to improved sustainability persists one of the main challenges to Marine Governance. Marine Governance involves processes of interaction between state actors, market parties, supranational organizations and civil society in a multi-level and multi-layered institutional setting. We argue that processes of integration and cooperation are core drivers to regionalize previous European – state based institutions. Accordingly, the main aim of this article is to provide a framework to unravel the challenges of integration and cooperation in Marine Governance. Particularly through processes of regionalization, i.e. when redefining territorial spaces and recomposing political spaces at the regional sea level, this framework is used to assess how integration and cooperation perform in EU marine governance. Specifically, four modes of regionalization in Marine Governance have been identified depending on the level of cooperation and integration, referred to as: territorial synchrony, territorial anarchy, sectoral anarchy and sectoral synchrony. While some developments towards more territorial synchrony for EU Marine Governance is observed, more cooperative and integrated efforts will be needed to eventually become successful in moving from sectoral anarchy to the desired territorial synergy expressed in EU marine regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas participatory processes have been advised as decision support to environmental management worldwide, the way different ways of organizing them influence outcomes of such processes have not been sufficiently addressed. In this study we reflect on two specific types of framings for participatory processes by examining one case dominated by stakeholders and another facilitating deliberation among citizens. Both processes concern coastal zone management in Norway. Whilst the main aim of the paper is to address how the framing of a participatory process influences its form and content, we also emphasize the distinct differences in outcomes from the two processes. Our analyses show that people are clearly acknowledging that there is a difference between acting as a citizen and as a stakeholder, and finding it unproblematic to identify themselves with such roles. Based on the findings, we reflect on their significance because fostering such logic throughout participatory processes may enhance our capacity to think both more long term and more principally about which values to protect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Stakeholder participation is frequently recommended to ensure that public values are taken into account in the decision-making processes. However, few attempts have been made to analyse the extent to which increasing stakeholder participation actually leads to better representation of the public values. The main aim of this study is to obtain more insights about reasons why the most frequently applied form of stakeholder participation, i.e. the public hearings, may fail in representing the general public views and values when applied at a local level. A case study was conducted on policy formulations and decision-making in the coastal zone on the island Flekkerøy in southern Norway. Local- and regional-public authorities contributed in in-depth interviews and with written documentation to inform about a comprehensive stakeholder participation process that took place in the early 1990s. The main findings include that landowner interests, and not public views and values, were legitimised during the participatory process because of: (1) the landowner''s strong local social power among inhabitants, (2) the design of the participatory processes favouring the landowner interests, (3) the personal relations between local landowners and public managers, and (4) the low representation of public views and values due to a problem of scale, i.e. the NIMBY syndrome. Based on our experience, we recommend improving representation of public views by changing the frequently applied participatory processes to also include citizens in addition to interest groups and experts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The main purpose of this study is to show how the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology can be applied to prepare and facilitate desired changes which the fishery sector with its stakeholders face. This is shown by an application of the AHP methodology in the shrimp fishery sector in Trinidad and Tobago. Moreover, the AHP is assessed for its capacity to support decision-making in countries which are initiating or continuing transition to more responsible and sustainable fisheries management. The AHP was found to be an “empowering, educating, focusing, facilitating and quantifying tool”, with potential to more generally support fisheries management also in the future. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]