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Ilhamsyah Cahya Erdianto, S.P.W.K.; Achmad Zein Maulana
Journal of Engineering, Infrastructure and Geosciences (2025)
Indonesia has folded marine spatial planning into provincial spatial plans, requiring conformity assessment for activities using marine space alongside the long-established land-use planning apparatus. This study asked what the international marine spatial planning literature predicts about such integration, and assessed the Indonesian arrangement against those predictions. The method combines documentary analysis of the provincial spatial plan and its marine annexes with a structured review of empirical marine spatial planning research published between 2017 and 2024. Three findings emerge. First, the international evidence is markedly less favourable than the policy discourse surrounding integration: across more than fifty implemented plans, stated objectives skew toward environmental and economic goals while cultural heritage, indigenous rights, human well-being and climate adaptation are largely neglected, and independent index assessment finds participatory and adaptive principles the weakest-performing dimensions. Second, the critical literature identifies specific depoliticising mechanisms through which participation becomes choreographed rather than substantive, and warns that importing standardised frameworks into tropical contexts risks displacing small-scale fishers. Third, Indonesian marine governance has been characterised as path-dependent toward large-scale infrastructure and profit-oriented activity, which is precisely the condition under which the international critique predicts that integration functions as economic licensing. The study argues that whether integration serves allocation or protection is determined by participation design rather than by the planning instrument itself.