Governing the Land-Sea Interface to Achieve Sustainable Coastal Development

Coastal regions are essential to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) given their importance for human habitation, resource provisioning, employment, and cultural practice. They also where different ecological, disciplinary, jurisdictional boundaries both overlap obscured. We thus propose land-sea interface as areas governance systems most in need of frameworks analysis meet SDGs—which inherently interconnected— integrate complex interdependencies between livelihoods, energy, transport, food production, nutrient flows (among others). a strategic framework built on sustainable transitions literature plan achieve development across interface. To illustrate our proposal, we compare planning processes four case-based scenarios: an industrialized coastal country, least developed developing country with local dependencies ocean resources, small island state primarily dependent tourism. Through lens aligning actors actions vertically (subnational national), horizontally (across sectors), programmatically (from goals implementation), scales at which may be misaligned, such agencies that affect marine have conflicting visions goals, leading stalled progress or counterproductive actions. Where possible, highlight strategies align high level policy, tactical scale institutional mandates cooperation, ground activities operations, based goals.