Procedural Justice In Marine Nature Reserve Establishment

Participatory environmental governance is framed as contributing to the equity ambitions of sustainable development. The trend of formal delegation of power to decentralized institutions of various kinds has been extensive. It can be questioned, however, if these more pluralistic approaches can adequately deal with and balance uneven power relationships between stakeholders or if existing power relations are reproduced through these processes. As a result of pre-existing inequalities weaker actors may risk getting ignored, neglected, manipulated or even abused. Marine governance has also adopted these democratic ambitions, but empirical examination of practice has been severely neglected by the social sciences. Arguably, as a result marine governance has not been exposed to sufficient reflection regarding its social purpose, process and implications. The focus of this paper, democratic aspects of environmental governance of the Baltic Sea, is especially understudied.

In this paper, I draw on the concept of procedural justice linked to power to examine and compare the establishment of St Anna archipelago and Gräsö archipelago nature reserves in Sweden. The former case has been characterised by authorities as consensus oriented while the latter has been seen to be conflictual. By employing the procedural justice concept over time in this under studied and novel empirical setting the present paper aims to develop new understandings and formulations of justice and thereby contribute to the literature on participatory environmental governance, marine governance, nature protection, and environmental justice. The paper will show that issues related to legitimacy, identity and representation are substantial in both cases, as well as conflicts between public and private interests and that a long-term struggle for ‘independence’ is being played out in the setting up of nature reserves.