Making sense of marine management – The ten-tenets revisited

Abstract

The so-called ten-tenets were proposed over a decade ago to indicate actions to achieve sustainable and successful marine management. These indicated that marine management actions should be Ecologically sustainable, Technologically feasible, Economically viable, Socially tolerable/desirable, Legally defensible, Administratively achievable, Politically expedient, Ethically defensible/morally correct, Culturally inclusive and Effectively communicable. These concepts are revisited here to show a continuum from an Ecosystem-Based Approach (EBA, setting the priorities and polices), to Ecosystem-Based Management (EBM, operationalising the approach by management and governance) and then using tools, including technological and economic instruments, now termed Ecosystem-Based Technical Measures (EBTM). This shows the way the tenets overlap while the underlying definitions still hold for holistic marine management and are valuable in prioritising marine management actions. We emphasise that the tenets for the overarching ecological and communication aspects should be weighted differently but that taken together all other tenets would be weighted equally although they could have a weighting depending on their user. For example, the economic tenet may be weighted highly in economically-challenging times and the cultural tenet in areas with indigenous peoples.