The Importance Of Marine Spatial Planning

The significance of marine spatial planning to address various and environmental problems in marine and coastal areas has been widely acknowledged by the government. However, in fact, most of local governments have neglected the importance of this and still focus on carrying out the spatial planning on land. Local governments that have marine and coastal zones within their jurisdiction should pay more attention by arranging a marine spatial plan.

In fact, Indonesia’s president-elect Joko Widodo, also supports marine spatial planning by declaring a program to focus on maritime sectors . His pledge to foster such issue shows that Indonesia’s marine spatial planning issues will be a priority.

Meanwhile, The Spatial Planning Law stipulates that

One of most widespread weaknesses in arranging a marine spatial planning is centralized planning and top-down approach to implement such planning. Regard to these issues, Ferse et al assert that when the stakeholder engagement in management planning is absent, the outcomes of marine spatial planning might be ‘counterproductive’ to the required objective of such planning and might produce the negative impacts on local people and ecosystems . They give an example to avoid such negative consequences in formulating a marine protected area in Indonesia. They explain that to identify a conflicting conservation area and cooperation among stakeholders, ‘participatory mapping’ of their interests and the usage of natural resource of ‘potentially affected groups’ could be useful . This measure uses a combination between such identification data and Geographical Information System (GIS) as an useful tool for incorporate native knowledge within scientific knowledge and to map the different use of marine resources and strengthen local communities’ involvement in the planning process as a basis to negotiate interests and developments among relevant

The process of formulating marine spatial planning does not unlike create a collaborative session, in which a group of stakeholders draft a plan to discuss how particular zones are currently used and how additional uses or development could potentially occur. According to the president of The Ocean Foundation (Spalding) and Director of the Prince 's Foundation for the Built Environment (Brooks), the challenge in such process is guaranteeing the session represents ‘those species on whom economic activity depends’ and shows the possible consequences when wrong choices are made on the particular designation area . Therefore, to address these issues, Pomeroy (Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics in University of Connecticut) and Douvere suggest that formulating marine spatial planning should consider stakeholders’ level of involvement and stakeholders’ identity . These approaches would guarantee a sense of belonging of such planning and resulted in stakeholders’