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- Info
Symposium on Coastal Management: Planning on the Edge
| Author: |
Godschalk, David R.; Cousins, Kathryn, eds |
| Date: |
1995 |
| Periodical: |
Journal of the American Planning Association |
| Abstract: |
The first general lesson from coastal management is that it shows there is a time to plan and a time to act. The federal coastal program recognized this lesson from the start by separating the planning and implementation stages and requiring states to progress from planning to management. Other national planning programs have ignored this lesson at their peril.
Second, designers of new planning programs must account for the nature of legislatures. National coastal policy has been crafted through an intricate political process built around committee structures, constituency relationships, and tradeoffs that have buffered the policy from attacks by administrations and courts. State coastal policies, on the other hand, typically have not enjoyed such strong political alliances, and state legislative support has tended to be much more fragile. A third lesson is that, for incentive-based, voluntary programs with broad goals, administrative tactics must stress collaborative relationships and implementation stages that account for participant learning and development. Expectations must be geared to differing state and local situations, rather than to uniform standards, and managers must be prepared to negotiate consensus to defuse conflicts, as Larry Susskind and Scott McCreary show in their "Planner's Notebook" article. A final lesson is that even successful national programs may have limited life expectancies. To enjoy a long life, the coastal program ultimately must make the transition to state and local authority and support. Negative decisions in Congress in 1985 on CZMA reauthorization, CBRA reauthorization/amendment, or OCS revenue sharing, however, might force a premature transition for the coastal program. Coastal management has become a necessity for the United States. According to the national trend, in fifteen years three of every four Americans will be living within fifty miles of a shore (Hill 1984), where they will be competing for space with both water dependent industries and environmental preserves. This incipient conflict undergirds the increasing urgency of coastal management as a prime national priority. |
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