Once your marine spatial planning (MSP) initiative has gone into implementation, it is important to know whether or not the MSP management measures are moving your toward achieving your initial goals and objectives. Such knowledge can be obtained by monitoring and evaluating the performance of you MSP management measures. An essential aspect of any monitoring effort is the development of indicators to monitor.

 

At least two types of monitoring are relevant to MSP and are closely related:

 

(a) Assessment of the state of the system (for example, what is the state of biodiversity in the marine management area?)

(b) Measuring the performance of the MSP management measures (for example, are the management actions we have taken producing the outcomes we dersire?)

 

 

Various countries have used different ways to monitor and evaluate their MSP initiatives. We are currently compiling a set of good practices to illustrate how countries have organized monitoring and evaluation of MSP successfully. We expect to have it available here by the end of June 2009.

 

You can read about an initial set of good practices on monitoring and evaluating performance of MSP in Step 9 (p. 86-91) of the guide "Marine spatial planning: A step-by-step approach toward ecosystem-based management". Download (pdf, 1.55 MB)