Ecosystem-Based Integrated Ocean Management: A Framework for Sustainable Ocean Economy Development

On a philosophical level, there is concern that put- ting a monetary value on nature and associated human wellbeing is a vehicle for legitimizing and entrenching economic decision-making models that, by design, marginalize nature and human well- being (Hirons et al. 2016, Raworth 2017). Kenter et al. (2018) argue that the concept of ecosystem ser- vices in itself facilitates the commodification and privatization of nature and operationalising the sort of trade-offs critiqued along with the weak sustain- ability paradigm in section 2.4. Ocean managers should question, communicate and interpret the meaning of marine ecosystem services evaluation with appropriate circumspec- tion. There are situations in which resources may be better spent on alternative approaches for knowl- edge integration and for the reflection of plural values in decision-making (Bennett 2018, Bennett 2019a, Kenter et al. 2018). However, in established decision-making processes that are swayed heavily by economic cost-benefit calculations, ecosystem services valuation provides a useful and pragmatic way of accounting for non-market values in a ‘lan- guage’ that is understandable to decision makers (Hirons et al. 2016).

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