Turning Plans into Action: the Marine Plan Partnership for the North Pacific Coast's Shift from Plan Development to Implementation

Integrated marine planning is emerging globally as a leading tool for achieving ecological, social, cultural, and economic objectives within shared ocean areas. To that end, the Marine Plan Partnership for the North Pacific... [ view full abstract ]

Integrated marine planning is emerging globally as a leading tool for achieving ecological, social, cultural, and economic objectives within shared ocean areas. To that end, the Marine Plan Partnership for the North Pacific Coast (MaPP) was formed as a collaborative, government-to-government initiative between the Province of British Columbia and 17 member First Nations. Together, the MaPP partners co-led the development of integrated marine use plans for 102,000 km² of Canada’s Pacific coast. Over the course of four years, the partners completed a set of comprehensive marine plans for four sub-regions and an accompanying Regional Action Framework, which includes objectives and strategies related to governance, marine zoning and protection, stewardship and monitoring, and sustainable economic development.  In anticipation of what was to come, the MaPP partners initiated a number of key actions towards the end of the planning  phase to ensure a seamless transition to implementation. This included developing a longer term business plan, securing and allocating initial funding, identifying short- and long-term priorities for implementation, and identifying preliminary measures of plan performance.  Now into year 4 of implementation, the MaPP partners have achieved some key milestones, including the signing of formal implementation agreements in 2016, and gathered early learnings to support implementation of marine plans in other regions.