Writing a coastal zone management book is both an enlightening and sobering experience. The sheer diversity and magnitude of the problems in global coastal zones sometimes left us with a sense of hopelessness that coastal management initiatives, however well thought out, will never really make a substantial impact.
Then just when the problems of the coast seemed to be crowding in on us, we would write about coastal management successes from the literature or our own experiences in academic research, consulting and government service. Or one of our contributors would send us information about innovative techniques used to improve the condition of coastal zones and the livelihoods of people supported by them.
Our book is infused with this sense of realism about the current condition of coastal zones and how these conditions can be improved through planning and management. Our approach was to mix theoretical analysis with current best-practice coastal management and planning examples from around the world. Our aim was to provide clear and practical guidelines for the people who make daily decisions about the world's coastlines. We also wanted to produce a text book that could be used at advanced undergraduate and graduate levels and help train the next generation of coastal managers to face this challenge.
The focus is explicitly on the linkages between coastal management tools used in all stages of coastal planning from development through evaluation to implementation. In doing so, the various styles of coastal plans are analysed, a number of key coastal management tools are outlined, together with the institutional arrangements used to deliver coastal programs.
Several broad themes and principles emerged from the book:
- Coastal programs are now generally based on principles of sustainable development, the precautionary principle, and inter-generational equity.
- Successful coastal planning and management activities are generally so strongly linked that in successful coastal programs they are almost indistinguishable.
- Consensual plan production has become the most widely used approach for integrated coastal plans at the regional and local levels.
- Responsibility for sustainably managing the coast is shared by all levels of government, from international to local, along with coastal users, residents, private companies and advocacy groups.
- Western approaches to coastal planning and management, while successful in many countries, especially those with European land-tenure systems, often require modification if they are to be successfully integrated into other cultural settings.
- Coastal programs have become a melting pot for various planning and management techniques which have crossed over from other disciplines.
- Issues requiring coastal management and planning cut across jurisdictions, occur at widely different scales, and involve a diversity of stakeholders.
- No single plan can be expected to cope with all coastal issues, but management practices and plans can be substantially improved by mixing integrated coastal plans at different scales, orientations and statutory bases.
- Coastal plans require quantitative evidence of their effectiveness.
Underlying these themes is evidence of increased community empowerment in coastal planning. Innovative consensus building tools are increasingly likely to be used to ensure that consensus does not equate to "lowest common denominator", resulting in bland outcomes.
There is a plethora of coastal plans around the world, addressing vastly different issues, often in very different ways. But a common feature of most of these plans is the absence of quantitative evidence of their effectiveness - this despite the often considerable resources used in their formulation and implementation. Politicians, government departments and the public are increasingly expecting coastal programs to provide clear demonstrations of success. Performance measures, evaluation criteria and success indicators have become part of the coastal managers lexicon. Yet measuring how successful coastal programs are is only just beginning in earnest. Coastal program managers are increasingly required to include monitoring and evaluation measures into program design at the outset a difficult task without a set of commonly accepted coastal management performance measures.
We felt the book would evoke contrasting responses in the reader: pessimism at its rather depressing list of often chronic problems, painting a not too bright future for the coast; or excitement and optimism about the challenges that these problems present. We concluded that a realistic coastal planner / manager is one who would absorb a little of both and plan to pragmatically tackle the major challenges facing the world's coast, while being creative and flexible in dealing with the inherent limitations of the workings of government and private sector bureaucracies. To this planner / manager we offered our Six Virtues of Coastal Planning: to seek, to understand, to develop, to link, to bring into mainstream, to sustain. Only through the efforts of those coastal managers, helped we hope by our book, that the considerable efforts required to sustainably manage the world's coastal zones has a chance of success.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
