Assessing progress toward integrated coastal zone management: Some lessons from Egypt

Abstract The interface areas between marine and terrestrial environments encompasses some of the most exploited and vulnerable ecosystems in the world. How these transitional environments can be effectively planned and managed has led to the creation of new planning instruments. Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) has been widely promoted as a potential mechanism for effective and integrated planning and management of these areas. However achieving the aspirations for ICZM is complex not least because of the many human activities and diverse regulatory regimes that exist in coastal areas, whose interest and concerns must be effective integrated into a single policy and implementation regime. Within the context of the developing world countries there have been few critical and analytical evaluations of why ICZM experiments have failed. This paper seeks to begin to address this gap by suggesting that Actor Network Theory (ANT) is an appropriate analytical framework to critically evaluate why ICZM initiatives in Egypt, at both the national and local level, have been relatively unsuccessful. The critical evaluation leads to some practical recommendations that could help to enhance the implementation of ICZM in Egypt and other developing countries.