Marine scaping: The structuring of marine practices

Oceans and seas are heavily exploited by different kinds of human activities. More and more information becomes a formative force in governing conflicting human activities and spatial claims at sea, as it is changing processes, institutions and practices of marine governance. This paper presents a conceptual framework for assessing informational processes related to integrated marine governance. Marine scaping serves as an analytical lens, referring to the practice of staging and ordering of marine activities in time and space. The marine scaping framework brings together the dynamics of information and the specific place-bound setting of competing claims at sea, and captures change by looking at the interplay between seascape, humanscape and mindscape. We illustrate the framework with the case of creating a Marine Protected Area (MPA) Network at the North Sea. By showing the process of marine scaping through information, it becomes clear that, until now, specific conditions have frustrated the development of a network of MPAs, but that informational interactions could pave the way for new possibilities at the level of the regional sea (elaboration).

► The paper explores how information relates to governing spatial conflicts at sea. ► We developed the marine scaping framework, consisting of sea-, mind- and humanscapes. ► Marine scaping is illustrated with the example of creating a North Sea MPA network.