ABSTRACT
The first decade of the new millennium was an exciting time for marine spatial planning in the United States. The national government, reacting to both dire new warnings on the decline of its marine resources and the global ocean and to periodic calls to improve its governance of ocean areas, announced a new draft marine policy near the end of 2009. But long before that, some of the individual states had pioneered ocean zoning efforts in a push to improve marine management in state waters (to 3nm offshore). This was made possible by the ‘new federalism’ that emerged in the latter decades of the twentieth century, which ushered in a delicate power-sharing between the state governments and the national government of the United States. To date this power sharing has resulted in a series of unconnected, and as yet uncoordinated, initiatives, with each entity utilizing spatial planning only within their own jurisdictions and little thought given to the interface between adjacent (or sometimes overlapping) jurisdictions. This final case study chapter will begin with a look at two states on opposite coasts that have utilized ocean zoning in different ways and to different ends – but with the common end result of forcing the federal government's hand on marine spatial management.
