Marine (Aquaculture) Space Allocation: Assessing Transitional Challenges to Local Economies in New Zealand

Local economies of marine areas are largely unexplored in mainline journals, perhaps because they have been considered marginal to the land, too underdeveloped, too specialised or of little importance in the local economy. The relatively recent emphasis on marine spatial planning and the development of offshore power generation has drawn attention to the importance of rights to marine areas. There exist natural tensions between activities that rely on the relatively permanent occupation of marine space (e.g. aquaculture) and those that require that same space for transitional periods of times, perhaps fleetingly, as space ‘to move through’ (e.g. fishing). Different methods of resolving these tensions can produce significant inequities, but less acknowledged is the potential for significant disruption of local economies caught in the contortions of transitions from one legislative regime to another. A recent aquaculture case in New Zealand serves as the basis for an analysis of issues of locality in decision-making when an existing rights holder seeks to renew those rights at a time of transition between one regime and another.