Ocean governance and institutional change

Abstract

The extension of coastal state jurisdiction, culminating with the widespread establishment of 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) is one of the most far-reaching institutional changes in the international society of the twentieth century. Vast ocean areas with an enormous wealth of natural resources that were previously open to all as part of the high seas, have been turned into assets of coastal states. A principal justification for this change was the growing sense at the third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III), which took place from 1973 to 1982, that international efforts to manage human uses of marine resources had failed. A new approach was required, that vested the responsibility for the sustainable use of the oceans with those most dependent upon them: the coastal states. The implementation of EEZs granted coastal states extensive rights to natural resources located in a zone extending out to 200 nautical miles (360 kilometres) off the coastal states baselines. The recognition and formal establishment of EEZs has brought a significant part of the worlds oceans under the jurisdiction of coastal states. In addition, the majority of the oceans primary productivity and fisheries production is located in the coastal shelf regions within the EEZs. Today, 145 states1 are parties to the 1982 United National Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC), enabling them to establish EEZs. The EEZs of the world now cover most continental shelf resources and the majority of the worlds fisheries (United Nations, 2004). There is substantial variation in the nature of the challenges that face countries that attempt to conserve and manage the natural resources in their waters. The status of fisheries, pollution, minerals exploitation, transportation and other ocean use activities varies among the different countries. Because of this, although the concept of EEZs constitutes a common institutional framework for meeting the many governance challenges relating to the use of this area, we expect that there will be variation in the institutional responses to meeting these challenges. When a country develops and implements its EEZ-regime, it does so in response to its particular needs and interests. The principal goal of this book is to analyse the institutional consequences emerging from the transition from an ocean governance regime based on open access to the resources of the ocean to a regime based on EEZs from the 1970s onwards. The focus is on the performance of EEZ regimes in the management of living marine resources, specifically with the development of institutions for that purpose. The key issue we examine is the governance effects of the introduction of EEZs. Although institutions based on the EEZ regime share fundamental legal attributes, the national regimes vary with regard to legislation, administrative structures, and effectiveness. By accounting for the sources of this variance, this volume also seeks to contribute to our understanding of the roles that institutions play in global environmental change and, more specifically, to address the reasons why some institutional responses to environmental problems prove more effective than others (Young et al., 1999). In doing so, we have taken the following research questions as our point of departure: • What is the nature of the institutions that coastal states have created within the framework provided by the EEZs? • How has the creation of the EEZs affected the interplay among international regimes, national management systems, and traditional systems of marine tenure and co-management operating at the local level? • How has the development of EEZ-based regimes affected the fit of marine resource management institutions with biophysical systems? In the remainder of this chapter we provide a brief historical background and set the institutional context for the case studies that are presented in this volume.