Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) as a Challenge to Spatial Planning: On Vision-Building and Decision-Making. An Empirical Evaluation of Applied Planning in Germany.

Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) as a means of enhancing sustainability has been the topic of a model project promoted by the EU during the late 1990s. Meanwhile, all member states areurged by an EU recommendation to develop national ICZM strategies, based on a set of criteria derived from this model project. The most prominent rationale of the criteria is a request to reassess existing spatial planning procedures and routines, in order to make them more participative and tostrengthen and diversify the role of civil society actors.However, before ICZM was promoted, many European countries had already developed more or lesscomplex features to include a growing number of actors in various stages of spatial planningprocesses: In concept building, decision making, and implementation. As a consequence, the EUrecommendations have not been unanimously appreciated. One of the main arguments against them claimed that already existing schemes and procedures (i) provide a wide array of participativeelements, and that (ii) participation has thus been a core element of spatial planning, even beforeICZM appeared on the scene....