The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge game: Short Sea Shipping (SSS) Edition is a table-top strategy board game, designed for policy-makers and stakeholders involved in MSP, short-sea shipping and the Blue Economy. It is a ‘serious game’, allowing the development of a better understanding of the issues involved in MSP through creative and imaginative role playing, taking into account the relevant professional and personal experience of the players. The authors present and discuss the use of the MSP Challenge board game to test how, and to what extent, the concept can help stakeholders understand Maritime Spatial Planning.
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The diversity and intensity of human activities in the North Sea region (NSR) and other maritime regions are increasing. This necessitates transboundary coordination at the sea basin level, which is required but yet insufficiently established. Through European co-funded projects, national policymakers, stakeholders, and scientists in MSP are enabled to develop transboundary coordination (TBC) mechanisms. TBC requires, alongside other factors, a form of social and policy learning between these actors in different countries. The NorthSEE project (2016–2022) was an example of such an EU-co-funded project and was aimed at enhancing coherence in MSP processes and plans across the NSR. This article examines the project's key learning outcomes, the role of the MSP Challenge Simulation Platform in supporting these outcomes, and factors that enabled or constrained learning within the project. Data was collected during the project via document analysis, questionnaires from participatory stakeholder workshops, interviews with sixteen project participants and ten workshop participants, and observations. The study highlights that project participants have gained more insight into each other's planning systems, are able to contact each other more easily, and have initiated several follow-up initiatives. Furthermore, it shows that interactive and participatory tools, such as the MSP Challenge Simulation Platform, can contribute to individual and social learning by providing participants with instant feedback on their decisions. These learning outcomes have been influenced by various enabling and constraining conditions, including time, resources, and the differing levels of expertise and knowledge among project partners and participants. Assessing the broader societal impact remains a challenge and warrants further attention.
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The Maritime Spatial Planning (MSP) Challenge simulation platform helps planners and stakeholders understand and manage the complexity of MSP. In the interactive simulation, different data layers covering an entire sea region can be viewed to make an assessment of the current status. Users can create scenarios for future uses of the marine space over a period of several decades. Changes in energy infrastructure, shipping, and the marine environment are then simulated, and the effects are visualized using indicators and heat maps. The platform is built with advanced game technology and uses aspects of role-play to create interactive sessions; it can thus be referred to as serious gaming. To calculate and visualize the effects of planning decisions on the marine ecology, we integrated the Ecopath with Ecosim (EwE) food web modeling approach into the platform. We demonstrate how EwE was connected to MSP, considering the range of constraints imposed by running scientific software in interactive serious gaming sessions while still providing cascading ecological feedback in response to planning actions. We explored the connection by adapting two published ecological models for use in MSP sessions. We conclude with lessons learned and identify future developments of the simulation platform.
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