BIO

Jane is a PhD graduate from Belfast, Northern Ireland. Jane’s research, funded by the Northern Irish Department for Economy and supervised by Dr. Wesley Flannery and Prof. Geraint Ellis, focused on the role of marine spatial planning (MSP) in facilitating climate change mitigation and adaptation through the transition to a low carbon economy. Jane has previously worked as a Research Assistant on the INTERREG project MOSES, which involved organising stakeholder workshops. Jane is now the Nature Protection Policy Officer for RSPB Northern Ireland, working on protected sites, environmental governance, and post-Brexit environmental standards and regulations.

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PhD STUDY

Marine Spatial Planning and the Transition to a Low Carbon Economy: A critical evaluation of the UK approach
 

An effective response to climate change demands the rapid decarbonisation of global economies through complementary strategies of mitigation and adaptation. Such change requires the upscaling and acceleration of multilevel governance and cross-sectoral transformations towards a low-emissions world. One such tool to achieve the low carbon transition is marine spatial planning (MSP), which has been promoted as capable of solving interrelated economic, environmental and social conflicts. MSP has thus become the most adopted approach for sustainable marine governance. However, despite MSP’s transformative capacity, evaluations of its implementation illustrate large gaps between how it is conceptualised and how it is practiced.

Jane’s PhD study provides a critical examination of how MSP facilitates the transition to a low carbon economy by comparatively evaluating Scottish and English approaches. To achieve this, a novel theoretical framework was developed by drawing upon boundary objects as a pioneering framework for examining collaborative work. Subsequently, the implications of power and inequality in the process of working across the boundaries of communities was conceptualised. In a practical sense, this framework, and more broadly this study, will describe the practical and political mismatches that occur between communities and the capacity of the MSP processes used to deal with these.

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SELECTED PUBLICATIONS​

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• McAteer, B., Fullbrook, L., Liu, W.H., Reed, J., Rivers, N., Vaidianu, N., Westholm, A., Toonen, H., van Tatenhove, J., Clarke, J. and Ansong, J.O., 2022. Marine Spatial Planning in Regional Ocean Areas: Trends and Lessons Learned. Ocean Yearbook Online, 36(1), pp.346-380.

• Clarke, J. and Flannery, W., 2019. The post-political nature of marine spatial planning and modalities for its re-politicisation. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 22(2), pp.170-183.

• Flannery, W., Clarke, J. and McAteer, B., 2019. Politics and power in marine spatial planning. In Maritime Spatial Planning (pp. 201-217). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

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MORE INFORMATION

You can read more on Jane's academic outputs and research interests by visiting her Google Scholar account.

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CONTACT DETAILS

To get in contact with Jane directly, get in touch via email - Jane.Clarke@rspb.org.uk

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SOCIAL MEDIA

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