How supportive are existing national legal regimes for multi-use marine spatial planning?—The South African case

Over the past six years international interest in multi-use marine spatial planning (MSP), as a practical process to launch integrated coastal management (ICM), exploded. This paper explores the extent to which existing national legal frameworks can support this process, focusing on the coastal marine environment. First the characteristics of an appropriate legal regime for multi-use MSP are explored by interrogating secondary data sourced from literature reviews and case studies. Key paradigms are distilled as a means of dissecting this complex process into a suite of characteristic determinants that disclose the underpinning environmental management approaches or principles. These criteria are then used to assess the compatibility of national legal regimes for multi-use MSP—in this instance the South African legal framework. Although multi-use MSP has not been explicitly adopted as a process within South Africa's broader ICM implementation, existing legislation does reveal support. The department responsible for the environment is viewed as the most appropriate agency to house the statutory mechanism for multi-use MSP at national and provincial levels, but delegating local multi-use MSP processes to local government agencies. The political will to deploy and dedicate duties and resources to effective implementation of multi-use MSP, however, remains critical. Finally, the approach adopted here is proposed as a means to assess the compatibility of other national legal regimes for multi-use MSP, although the suite of characteristic determinants may need to be reviewed from time to time, as new learning emerges from practice.