The development and finetuning of a spatial structure plan of the Belgian part of the North Sea should follow the GAUFRE project. The next step in the development of an SSP should be the elaboration of the social process of interaction between scientists, stakeholders, decision makers and the public. The projected output should trigger and feed further discussions. The development of an SSP then becomes an interactive and iterative process which leads to a publicly supported and generally accepted proposal of a spatial structure plan on which decisions are made and implementations are made.