Conference Agenda

Effective ocean governance is urgently needed to address shared policy problems such as overfishing, illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing, the destruction of marine habitats and loss of marine biodiversity. Ocean governance is characterized by a complex and highly fragmented institutional landscape, with multiple international organizations addressing interconnected issues, exhibiting ‘functional overlaps’ across mandates, objectives and members states. Concerns have been raised that increasing institutional complexity could affect the ability of international organizations to solve shared policy problems, as it may result in contradictory policy responses, which can contribute to legal inconsistency and limit compliance, cause inefficiencies and duplicated efforts, while boosting competition across international organizations over resources and mandates. There is a widespread assumption that coordination across international organizations with functional overlaps is important for fostering effective governance that can create synergies rather than trade-offs, for example by strengthening policy coherence, clarifying divisions of labor and making use of different sources of information, knowledge and expertise. However, few studies have systematically studied coordination efforts across multiple international organizations, and how it affects the ability of these organizations to address shared policy problems. Ocean governance - being highly complex and fragmented in nature, provides an appropriate case for exploring coordination efforts across international organizations with functional overlaps operating within the same broadly defined issue area while addressing multiple specific policy problems within that issue area. Specifically, this paper asks: how and when do international organization with functional overlaps coordinate their work, and what are the implications for their ability to address shared policy problems? The findings of this paper will contribute to ongoing debates in the literature on institutional complexity on institutional overlap, coordination and policy coherence, as well as to the literature on problem-solving capacity of international organizations.

The marine environment and its biodiversity are currently being subjected to a large amount of pressure as a result of anthropogenic drivers such as climate change, ocean acidification, marine plastic, and marine noise. These significant stresses would indicate not only a dramatic shift in the marine environment but also a number of questions regarding the applicability of current instruments and how the existing institutions should respond to the complex marine environmental issues in the Anthropocene. This article looks into the existing variation of institutional architecture and their regulatory response for the protection of the marine environment and its marine biodiversity in the Sea of East Asia (SEA). It shows that a number of institutions and initiatives at the regional level have been established by Government in response to the need for the protection of the marine environment. As a result, this institutionalization gives rise to a multiplicity of regulations and policies, many of which are complex and overlap. Although the adoption of these institutions and initiatives appears to have a positive impact on the conservation of marine biodiversity, the implementation of several laws and policies adopted by these institutions is considered as one of the main gaps in the protection of the marine environment and biodiversity. This article explicitly examines three relevant institutions for the protection of the marine environment and its biodiversity in the SEA, including the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Coordinating Body on the Seas of East Asia (COBSEA) and Partnerships in Environmental Management for the Seas of East Asia (PEMSEA). This study claims that there are various areas of overlap between the duties of these institutions in protecting the maritime environment and marine biodiversity in the EAS region. Therefore, managing the institutional overlap is essential to enhance the efficiency and accountability of the ASEAN, COBSEA and PEMSEA for the protection of the marine environment. In this respect, the concept of interplay management may help to enhance the efficiency and accountability of the institutions involved in the protection of the marine environment and its biodiversity in the SEA.

The world ocean is a plastic soup. Approximately 8 Mt of land-based plastic enter the ocean each year, adding to a growing sink of mismanaged plastic waste estimated at 6300 million metric tons in 2016. Recent attention to the human and environmental health impacts of marine plastic pollution moved intergovernmental organisations, multinational corporations, and environmental non-governmental organisations to address this crisis. This has spurred the United Nations to enter into negotiations for a Global Plastics Treaty.

The transboundary and cross-jurisdictional nature of marine plastic pollution has made its governance insurmountably complex. While there is no integrated binding instrument for marine plastic pollution, it is affected by existing multilateral environmental agreements, regulatory standard-setting schemes, industry associations, advocacy campaigns, beach clean ups, and social-behavioural rules and norms. These institutions, and many others, govern marine debris. My PhD research aims to understand this evolving governance architecture in the light of a new international agreement on plastic pollution.

My PhD research employs interviews to conduct a social network analysis of the governance network for marine plastic pollution. I ask professionals working in public, private, and non-profit institutions at the national, regional, and international levels how they collaborate to address marine debris and whether this constitutes effective governance. I build on constructivist regime theory to contribute to the evolving literature on regime complexes and non-regimes. This lays the groundwork for research on how plastic is governed at the global level and provides original insights to help decision-makers cultivate institutional integration to address this tragedy of the commons.

The protection of the marine environment depends on the availability of ocean data and functioning monitoring systems to support and measure the implementation of the global sustainability agenda and the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development. Although research has illustrated the need to integrate scientific, political and industrial efforts to increase the up-take of ocean science in decision-making, there is a lack of knowledge on how these relationships are formed in practice and how they already shape the monitoring of marine life.

By studying science-policy industry relations from the perspective of three marine biodiversity laboratories, this paper aims to advance our knowledge of the day-to-day practices and relations that underpin the co-production of knowledge on deep sea ecosystems. We conducted collaborative laboratory ethnography in Sao Paulo (Brazil), Brest (France) and San Diego (US) following a detailed field note taking guide and visual data collection to systematically observe the monitoring policies, practices and infrastructures in action and document the laboratory life in each of the three cases.

Our results illustrate close ties between marine science, policy and industry in each of the three laboratories, which we explain by overlapping monitoring interests in exploring, and exploiting marine resources and ecosystems. Yet, our results also indicate regional differences, which tend to be closely connected to 1) the research funding system of a country, 2) the scientific culture of the laboratory, 3) personal connections and ambitions, 4) marine resources and environmental conditions. We conclude by emphasising the need to consider laboratories and other spaces, where ocean science and knowledge is produced as transformative sites of global environmental agreement-making and power. This paper speaks to the general theme of the conference to bridge sciences and societies for sustainability transformations and analytical lens of adaptiveness and reflexivity.