An International Perspective on Integrated Coastal Area Management

Prof. Tim Smith - Director of the Sustainability Research Centre
at University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia

01 Keynote Speech_Prof. Tim Smith

“As for the future, your task is not to foresee it but to enable it”
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Traditionally, top-down approach was used all over the world. This approach does not actually work in reality as it is ineffective and inability to deal with complexity while complexity is a key trait of coastal management. The problems from this approach are mismatches of jurisdiction, benefits, costs and implementation; lack of coordination and trust (intra- and inter- institutional “silos”); institutional inertia... One of the challenges in the past of components approaches is that it is difficult to get a big picture.

But there are certain ways forward.

The first way is linking social and ecological systems, and also focusing on sustainability learning. Learning is really at heart for successful innovative coastal management. For coastal management, we need to look with systems perspective (holistic approach) and try to cover a range of different goals at the same time.

The second aspect is governance approaches, new governance arrangements. These focus on collaborative partnerships and effective community engagement, involving people in decision making. Reasons for community engagement are that first of all, people should be involved in the decisions that affect them (ethical rationale); secondly people may have unique contributions (such as technical expertise…) to public decisions and people’s values and technical knowledge should help to inform the final decision (substantive rationale); lastly, if you involve people in decision, they will not only support decision outcome but also facilitate the implementation of the decision (pragmatic rationale).

Coastal management has been evolved quite rapidly, particularly in the last 30 – 40 years. It has experienced a paradigm shift from management to governance, from top-down towards more participatory and holistic approach.

Complexity, uncertainty and high decision stakes in the context of climate change are key challenges for coastal management throughout the world. Sea level rise is relatively easy; it’s the extreme events that are the major worry! Therefore, building adaptive capacity to act, to response to extreme events, such as social network, education… is critical to deal with these challenges in coastal zones in the future.

The other thing that is important to consider is institutional complexity which are also huge challenges (different in institutional structure, regional coastal management plans, different land uses…).

So what we need to think about is how we can nest integrated coastal area management, how we link it to conservation agendas, development agendas, economic growth agendas, equity agendas, and international agendas, how we mainstream coastal management activities, whether our process enable to response to change in an adaptive way…

In summary, approaches to coastal management are continuing to rapidly evolve. We have the opportunity to focus on coastal management initiative as building consensus that engages people in decision making processes.

There are many different terms for coastal management: integrated coastal area management, integrated coastal zone management... and the common trait of those is integrated management. Integrated management firstly is dealing with multiple issues at the same time. Secondly, it is dealing with multiple objectives and outcomes at the same time. And thirdly, it is trying to integrate social and ecological systems. So the term integrated was used in a multi-faced ways.

All hard challenges of coastal management (pollution, equity issues and so on…) would exacerbate in the context of climate change. So we need to consider how we are going to do with climate change. One of the issues is that we often think of climate change in an environmental approach whereas in fact climate change is a social aspect. Coastal management is achieved through social processes.

Institutions for ICAM need to be adaptive but also mainstreamed.

Learning is really at the heart of an active coastal management initiative. When we deal with hard and complex environment, or uncertain impacts of climate change, we should take a deeper approach to help to deal with coastal management issues. How our institutions are as adaptive management processes? How do we create institutions that are going to be learning institutions? So we should not think about making mistakes as terrible things but as learning opportunities.

Q & A

Could you explain more on vulnerability?

Vulnerability is very complex and context specific. Environmental degradation can increase vulnerability. Similarly, technology, in some cases, can enable increasing vulnerability if we become dependent on technology. We need to understand the characteristic of the place, the change in exposure, sensitivity… and our ability to respond to these changes. Therefore our ability to assist on national scale really depends on particular context and place.

Australia has low population density, good development, strong environmental law enforcement. But in other parts of the world like South Vietnam, the situation is quite different. Should we use the same approach to manage the coastal areas or what do you think?

The principles are universal. Australia has a low population, but we have huge amount of infrastructure investment. New developments are usually on low line or coastline, which are very vulnerable to climate change impacts. We need to be aware of different contexts. And even in a country like Vietnam, there should be differences between provinces, different approaches in the North and the South that leads to implementing different solutions. The key thing to focus on is thinking about institutions that can be adaptive to change or learning institutions. If we can embed learning within our institution we can actually adjust them to certain context, problem…

Dr. Pham Tran Le, Tia Sang magazine: The integrated management we are discussing now mostly focuses on coastal areas. What lessons can we learn from the flood in Thailand for Vietnam in the near future?

Flooding is going to be challenges for ICAM in the future. The fundamental thing that we should learn is how we connect response to change and what the best mechanism to respond to change is. We are going to experience a lot of more flooding into the future. And the floods we do experience are going to be more severe. It is something we have to deal with, and be affected with. ICAM provide us a vehicle to look at the challenges we are going to face in a holistic way. It is not an issue that will affect the community in a few days or weeks but it is an issue that will affect the community in years, and decades in terms of changing livelihoods, changing economic structures and so on.