Planning and licensing for marine aquaculture

Abstract Marine aquaculture has the potential to increase its contribution to the global food system and provide valuable ecosystem services, but appropriate planning, licensing and regulation systems must be in place to enable sustainable development. At present, approaches vary considerably throughout the world, and several national and regional investigations have highlighted the need for reforms if marine aquaculture is to fulfil its potential. This article aims to map and evaluate the challenges of planning and licensing for growth of sustainable marine aquaculture. Despite the range of species, production systems and circumstances, this study found a number of common themes in the literature; complicated and fragmented approaches to planning and licensing, property rights and the licence to operate, competition for space and marine spatial planning, emerging species and diversifying marine aquaculture production (seaweed production, Integrated Multi‐Trophic Aquaculture [IMTA], nutrient and carbon offsetting with aquaculture, offshore aquaculture and co‐location and multiuse platforms), and the need to address knowledge gaps and use of decision‐support tools. Planning and licensing can be highly complicated, so the UK is used as a case study to show more detailed examples that highlight the range of challenges and uncertainty that industry, regulators and policymakers face across interacting jurisdictions. There are many complexities, but this study shows that many countries have undergone, or are undergoing, similar challenges, suggesting that lessons can be learned by sharing knowledge and experiences, even across different species and production systems, rather than having a more insular focus.

Sociological theory can illuminate several aspects of planning and licensing for aquaculture.However, there is more than one 'theory of society', as is exemplified by different meanings of the term governance in relation to Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) (Stojanovic and Gee, 2020).The sociological perspective used here is adapted from that of the Institutional Analysis and Development Framework (IADF) of Ostrom and colleagues (Ostrom, 2005, Ostrom, 2007, Ostrom, 2010, McGinnis, 2011, McGinnis and Ostrom, 2014), which provides a means of characterising Social-Ecological Systems (SES).Sociological parts of the IADF include the fundamental ideas of institutions and action situations, and the secondary concepts of governance and access rights to marine space and ecosystem services (i.e.goods).Recent aquacultural scholarship has been especially interested in these rights, and the problem of 'governing aquacultural commons' (Partelow et al., 2022).Here, however, we give most attention to the concept of polycentric governance, because this gives insight into several issues raised in section 2 of the main manuscript.Governance is understood here as the (legitimate) power-steering (Habermas, 1987, Habermas, 1996) of society, and is further defined, along with other key terms, in Table S1.Polycentric governance refers to control by multiple institutions at several levels of a hierarchy of power.It is illustrated in Figure S1, which relates to the UK case study in section 3 of the main manuscript, and includes wind-farming, to allow discussion of multi-use of sea-space.
The analysis of action situations (AS) lies at the core of the IADF.As an example, an application for permission to instal a marine fish farm in Scotland triggers an action situation that involves communication amongst a variety of actors and takes place under the constraints of various laws, regulations, policies and procedures to result in a binary outcome: either permission is granted or it is withheld.The collective term for the constraints is institutions, sometimes embodied in organisations such as Local Authorities, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), or the Scottish Government's Marine Scotland (SGMS) directorate.Institutions exist in the 'informational world' of Popper (1980), i.e., the Social System (SS) component of a SES, whereas organisations, consisting of people and facilities, are seen as part of the Ecological System (ES) component.
At the bottom of the governance hierarchy is the operational level.Ostrom (2007) and McGinnis and Ostrom (2014) set out schemes for characterising the SS and ES contexts of operational AS, and these have been adapted to aquaculture and applied to oyster cultivation in Maine, USA, by Johnson et al. (2019).In the Scottish example in Figure S1, operational governance requires compliance with the regulations made by the Scottish Government under the Water Environment and Water Services (Scotland) Act (WEWSSA) of 2003 and implemented by SEPA, and marine planning, overseen by SGMS under the Marine (Scotland) Act of 2010.The actors include local stakeholders and representatives of SEPA, SGMS, etc. Local opinion about fish farming (Billing, 2018) and multi-use (Billing et al., 2022) is part of the context of an AS.In the case of fish farming, the AS is not, as might seem logical, managed as part of MSP, but is instead steered by a county-scale Local Authority as part of Town and Country Planning.
The institutions that govern operational AS originate from AS at a higher level, where policies and regulations are made.This level is named 'collective choice', as it is that level at which society decides collectively on its options.We are familiar with the taking of such decisions in democratically elected parliaments, but other governance systems are available, and all societies need institutions that ensure the survival of their SS (and, ideally, their SES).In countries without strong central government, the institutions that control AS may be local norms that are perturbed by interventions from large-scale markets, e.g.Galappaththi and Berkes (2015).In the Scottish example, relevant policies are those of the Scottish Government (SG), concerning fish farming and MSP. 1 The WEWSSA and the Marine (Scotland) Act help provide the authority for these regulations and policies.
The constitutional level of governance provides the rules and broad policy directions that influence collective-choice AS.In the case of Scotland, this level includes the UK government and Supreme Court, and international agreements entered into by the UK.Before Brexit, the most important of these was the UK's membership of the European Union, which steered not only UK, but also Scots law.Scotland's WEWSSA explicitly implemented the European Water Framework Directive (WFD: 2000/60/EC), and its Marine (Scotland) Act implemented the European Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD: 2008/56/EC), and these provisions continue in Scots law, albeit subject to some uncertainty about changes in UK law (Harrison, 2021).After Brexit, the UK remains a signatory to international conventions such as OSPAR, which helps protect the environments in the NE Atlantic (Skjaerseth, 2006), and the UN's Sustainable Development Goals, where SDG 14 calls for member states to "conserve and sustainably use the oceans, sea and marine resources for sustainable development".
Polycentricity refers not only to hierarchy, but also to the multiple and overlapping domains of institutions and the organisations that embody them.This condition causes some of the licensing complexities that are seen as frustrating aquacultural developments in many countries (Galparsoro et al., 2020) and which have led to the calls cited in the main text for 'one-stop shops' that can issue unified permissions.The problem is even more challenging in the case of shared use of sea space for electricity generation from offshore wind energy (OWE) and finfish or shellfish aquaculture.The potential for such multi-use has been explored by Calado et al. (2019) and Depellegrin et al. (2019), but is rendered difficult by sector-specific planning and regulatory regimes as well as by by the way each sector has developed.Scotland provides an example.Farming of fish and shellfish has developed in sheltered inshore waters during the last half-century (Griggs, 2022), with fish-farming developments regulated by Local Authority planning decisions.There has been no systematic approach to designating 'Allocated Zones for Aquaculture' as recommended by the FAO (Aguilar-Manjarrez et al., 2017).In contrast, OWE is largely regulated by SGMS, with Crown Estates Scotland releasing designated zones for wind-farming.
Nevertheless, institutions can be crafted to overcome some of these difficulties.An agreement between Scottish LA and environmental organisations (Anon, 2010) has allowed pulling together as a team led by the Local Authority, improving the permitting process for fish farm developments.The Griggs report (Griggs, 2022) has made further suggestions for improvement of aquacultural regulation, including more adaptive governance (Greenhill et al., 2020) and transferring the permitting role of Local Authorities to SGMS, which might also aid multi-use.
Figure S1: Some of the institutions of polycentric governance relevant to planning and licensing for fin-fish and shellfish aquaculture, and offshore wind-farming, in Scotland as part of the United Kingdom.Action Situations (AS) governed by these institutions occur at all levels.At the operational level, where relevant AS involve applications for leases, authorisations and approvals, only salmonid farming needs the full range of permissions.Acronyms: SGMS: Scottish Government's Marine Scotland directorate; UNCLOS: UN Convention on the Law of the Sea; WEWSSA: Water Environment and Water Services (Scotland) Act Table S1: Key terms used in this section

Social-ecological System (SES)
An area in which human society interacts with 'nature', thus consisting of a social system within the 'informational world' (Popper, 1980) and an ecological system within the biophysical world ; see also Berkes et al. (1998) and Tett et al. (2013) Social system (SS) A communicative network (Luhmann, 1989) linking (human) persons and with rules that emerge from and shape personal actions (Sewell, 1992); Habermas (1987) subdivides SS into lifeworld and system, the latter steered by money (through markets) and power (through governance) Ecological system or Ecosystem (ES) Organisms (including humans as physical bodies) interacting (Lindeman, 1942) with their inanimate environment (including human constructions),

Action Situation (AS)
A finite communicative situation in which actors (acting for themselves or as agents of organisations) and governed by local and higher-order institutions, aim at, and often realise, actions in a SS, ES or SES that are intended to improve the functioning of these systems (adapted from McGinnis (2011), by adding purpose)

Actor
An embodied person communicating in society and having agency (the power of choice amongst possible actions and the ability to implement such choices in either or both SS or ES)

Commons
Any non-private goods and the open-access space containing them; the 'tragedy of the commons' (Hardin, 1968) refers to unsustainable use of these goods by self-interested actors: thus the commons needs governance (Partelow et al., 2022)

Goods
What the SS gets from the ES, classified (McGinnis, 2011) on basis of subtractability and cost of exclusion; common-pool goods are subtracted when used, and it is difficult to exclude users.Cf.Partelow et al. (2022), who included SS stuff (e.g.knowledge) in goods.

Governance
How power is directed to empower or constrain human action (Stojanovic and Gee, 2020) ; the governance system includes institutions and organisations (McGinnis and Ostrom, 2014) Institution A set of formal or informal norms, rules, laws, or procedures within a SS that constrain and empower actors and organisations Organisation An embodied institution, able to act in social and biophysical worlds