Scaling up restoration in coastal and marine ecosystems will require moving beyond project-based activities to large scale and coordinated restoration programs. Ideally this process will be evidence-based and transparent and will involve stakeholders in the decision-making process. How do we do this? This presentation will explore how principles from Structured Decision Making (SDM) can be harnessed to inform decisions about how and where to restore coastal and marine ecosystems. Structured decision making is an approach based in Decision Science and Risk Analysis which is used for the careful and organised analysis of natural resource management decisions. It is commonly used to inform some other marine conservation activities, such as the design of marine reserves, but the application of SDM to marine restoration is a developing area. There are 7 key steps in the structured decision-making process. 1) Define the problem; 2) Set clear objectives; 3) Identify alternatives (Actions) and their costs, feasibility, and constraints; 4) Predict consequences of the actions; 5) Evaluate trade-offs; 6) Make a decision; 7) Act, Monitor, Learn. I will present recent research which has employed SDM approaches to marine restoration, and highlight some of the opportunities and challenges of this approach.