A methodological approach to evaluate progress and public participation in ICZM: The case of the Cantabria Region, Spain

Stakeholder participation is a critical element of ICZM, deserving special attention while monitoring its progress. In this paper we developed and applied two complementary methods to assess both progress and stakeholder participation in ICZM in the Region of Cantabria, Spain. The ICZM progress assessment is complemented by a State of the Coast indicator, a tool to assess the effectiveness of ICZM decisions. The approach for evaluating public participation combines objective and perceptual assessments, by combining results of past projects with stakeholders interviews. By applying the approach to the Cantabria region we found that ICZM is advancing in developing a knowledge base for managing coastal resources, but it still lacks in improving critical elements of sustainability and governance, such as funding and participation. By assessing participation we found that the existing participatory framework is not sufficient to fill the needs for engagements in projects identified by stakeholders. These results should be used as a baseline to improve ICZM principles implementation in the Region of Cantabria.