By Rachel Holtby and Victor Owoyomi – Fellows at The Centre for Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN)
Marine planning in England plays a crucial role in shaping how our seas are used, balancing economic development with environmental protection and social needs. Established under the Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009, the system responds to increasing pressures on marine space and ensures that activities such as renewable energy, ports, fishing, shipping, conservation, and restoration can coexist sustainably.
At the heart of the process is the Marine Management Organisation (MMO), who prepare marine plans for English waters. These plans align with the UK Marine Policy Statement and set out a 20‑year vision for sustainable development across both inshore (0–12 nautical miles) and offshore areas (12–200 nautical miles). England currently has 11 marine plan areas, covered by 6 adopted marine plans, each with objectives and associated policies to guide decision‑making.
But despite their importance, understanding whether marine plans and marine plan policies are working is not straightforward.
Why monitoring marine plans is so difficult
At present, marine plans are monitored through a collection of indicators and supporting data. These indicators are supposed to tell us whether policies are achieving their intended outcomes. However:
- Indicators are a mix of ecological, social, and economic, making direct comparison difficult;
- Many indicators rely on external data sources with inconsistent update cycles;
- Some datasets are missing or out of date;
- Indicators differ in quality, coverage, and relevance to each policy area; and
- The data is not yet systematically evaluated.
All this means it is difficult to know whether marine plan policies are truly delivering progress, or how progress in one area may influence another.
Effective monitoring and evaluation is essential for sustainable and adaptive management: refining policies over time, responding to real‑world changes, and ensuring we stay within safe ecological and social limits.
A CECAN fellowship to explore new solutions
This CECAN fellowship set out to address a core question:
How can we organise marine plan monitoring data in a way that supports systems‑based evaluation and clearly shows how policies contribute to marine plan objectives?
In particular, the research explored whether visual tools could offer a more holistic picture, bringing together diverse indicator data to show progress toward each marine plan objective in a single, accessible format.
The aim was not just better data presentation, but better engagement with stakeholders, Defra, and other marine users. Visualisation could provide a pathway toward more adaptive marine management by highlighting:
- Which objectives appear to be progressing as intended;
- Which may be underperforming; and
- Where policy adjustments may be needed.
Learning from planetary boundaries and doughnut economics
To develop a systems‑focused approach, the research began by exploring two widely used frameworks:
Planetary Boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009) – A framework to map Earth system thresholds visually to show how humanity is performing on certain parameters and that it is exceeding many safe operating spaces, using real‑world data and boundary levels.
Doughnut Economics (Raworth, 2012; 2017) – A model for assessing how a system performs relative to ecological ceilings and social foundations, creating a “safe operating space” for people and the planet.
Both approaches use:
- Indicator‑based datasets;
- Normalisation of data (enabling ecological, social and economic comparison);
- Boundaries or thresholds; and
- Clear, intuitive visual diagrams.
The fellowship tested how these principles could be adapted for marine planning.
A new visual approach for marine plans
Borrowing learning from these previous approaches, including normalising the ecological, social, and economic data, one preferred output for marine planning was a radial visualisation of system properties. At different scales, each segment can represent either at the indicator level (Figure 1), the policy level (Figure 2) which is an aggregate of relevant indicators to the policy area, or objective level (Figure 3) which is an aggregation of all the policies within each objective.
Figure 1 Example: Normalised monitoring indicator data for one marine plan area
Figure 2 Example: Indicator data aggregated into marine plan policy areas, showing, for example, that the light blue and dark green policy areas are performing ‘better’ than the light green policy area.
Figure 3 Example: Policy data aggregated into marine plan objective areas, showing, for example, that the dark green and dark orange objectives are performing ‘better’ than the light green and light blue objectives.
However, and this was a major learning, the visibility of a triangle does not necessarily reflect reality. That is because:
- The challenges with indicators as previously discussed (reliance on externally sourced data meaning there are data gaps and outdated datasets; variable indicator quality, coverage and policy relevance), because the diagrams are based only on the available data, and therefore, missing data can look negative in the diagram;
- Normalisation of data can lead to the same numbers although they represent different ‘narratives’ about how those number were generated, but this is lost in the diagram; and
- Interactions between policy areas or objectives (positive, negative, neutral), whereby a policy area’s success may negatively or positively affect the success of another policy area, is difficult to determine from the radial diagrams.
In short: the diagrams are useful, but only when accompanied by careful explanation and require further thought (which is ongoing) to enable nuance to be represented in the diagrams.
Key learnings
Three main insights emerged from this work:
- Radial diagrams can be applied to marine plans. They provide an accessible, systems‑based visual summary of what is happening across policy and objective areas.
- Yet, the underlying data is uneven. Not all indicators are equal, some datasets are outdated, and some objectives have far more evidence behind them than others. Both normalisation and stakeholder input are essential.
- The visuals look simple, but the process isn’t. Significant data processing is required, and the diagrams must always be accompanied by narrative explanations to avoid misinterpretation.
Going forwards
This fellowship demonstrated the potential for systems‑based visual tools to support marine planning evaluation. With improved data, clearer system boundaries or thresholds for marine planning objectives, and stakeholder‑driven normalisation, such approaches could help marine planners and policymakers:
- Track progress more effectively;
- Respond adaptively as conditions change;
- Communicate insights more clearly to stakeholders; and
- Better understand the interconnected nature of marine systems.
As pressure on marine environments continues to grow, developing robust monitoring and evaluation tools will be essential for ensuring the long‑term sustainability of England’s seas.
Acknowledgement
We are really grateful to CECAN for the opportunity space to explore these ideas and would especially like to thank Martha Bicket and Helen Wilkinson for inspiring conversation and guidance in the project. We are also grateful to CECAN more broadly and the other CECAN Fellows who shared their time and ideas.