ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to identify and counter aspects of the European worldview that may cast doubt upon the appropriateness and relative merits of a human rights-based approach to marine spatial planning (MSP). The chapter begins by articulating and substantiating two claims. First, that the absence of human rights discourses from contemporary ocean governance – a field of international law and international relations with decidedly European origins – is the product of deep-rooted cultural biases which cast the sea as an asocial and apolitical space, land’s negative counterpart. Second, that these biases, which have long been prevalent in high-level processes of maritime territorialisation driven by public international law, are now shaping medium- and low-level processes of maritime territorialisation driven by supranational and national law, particularly instruments dealing with marine planning and management. The chapter proceeds to synthesise an alternative understanding of the relationship between humanity and the ocean, which it proposes as a basis for a human rights-based approach to MSP. At the heart of this understanding is a view of the ocean as a complex of variably vulnerable social-ecological systems.
