The diverse institutions and organizations (including governments, NGOs, community cooperatives, etc.) governing oceans may exclude specific groups, worldviews, and development pathways 24, and may operate on pre-defined constructions of resource sustainability that omit consideration of short-term challenges faced by many 22. Less powerful constituencies may be further marginalized as a result 22.Īlthough complex governance systems can act as a corrective for overly centralized power, diversification and expansion of the set of governance actors may counterintuitively increase power imbalances 23. For example, as renewed attention to and acceleration of the blue economy creates new spaces and opportunities to exert control, or derive or direct benefits, the powerful seek to capture those processes and outcomes in order to maintain their position 21. Uncoordinated, poorly specified, unaccountable governance allows the powerful to entrench and maintain their dominance. Such agreements also often lack the specificity necessary for implementation 20. Many existing international ocean governance frameworks lack strong accountability, relying instead on voluntary commitments and self-reported achievements 18, 19. And salient international legal definitions of equity vary, from jurisdictional entitlements in the Law of the Sea to intergenerational equity in international environmental law 16.įurthermore, despite the inherently transboundary and entangled nature of ocean governance issues, ocean governance continues to suffer from a lack of effective coordinating mechanisms across scales and sectors 10, 17. In the ocean governance literature, Jentoft addresses equity with the question, ‘who are the winners and who are the losers?’ 15, which elides many of the aspects of equity discussed in detail below. Influential work from Rawls similarly equates equity and justice with fairness 13, as does recent work on equity in marine conservation 14. ![]() Such a broad definition, based on concepts that must themselves be defined or interpreted in diverse contexts, provides insufficient basis for application 12. The Oxford English Dictionary proposes this ‘concrete’ definition of equity: ‘What is fair and right something that is fair and right’. This is particularly so in the context of a rapidly accelerating ocean economy 9 and emergent efforts to ensure that this ‘blue growth’ is environmentally sustainable 10 and leads to improved human development outcomes 11. Ocean governance that proceeds without a clear and thorough understanding of the complexities of equity is thus unlikely to achieve stated ambitions 6, 7 that include reducing global economic inequalities, improving human wellbeing, and sustaining the biosphere 8. ![]() Historical narratives positioning oceans as empty spaces of nature devoid of human life, and frontiers to be discovered, exploited, and conserved 3, overlook less resourced, less powerful ocean-reliant peoples and their rights and claims 4, 5. Oceans are shared spaces subject to competing claims and preferences over use 1 since the time of the Roman Empire’s Mare Clausum, the oceans have alternately been contested by trade and colonial powers, or framed as global commons 2.
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