Conclusion

Abstract

This book seeks to demonstrate that the pursuit of sustainable coastal development through integrated management, and that of making programmes and actions sensitive to global change, induces the scientific community to reject a positivism-rooted epistemological background, disjunctive logic and analytical methods, and to adopt a complexity-based epistemology, conjunctive logic and inductive methods. The decision-making system, in its turn, is required to tailor its goals and strategies to a holistic view of present and future coastal systems. It follows that ICM is an unprecedented task.