Ocean governance at the millennium: where we have been — where we should go

During the last third of the twentieth century, there has been a world-wide effort to develop an effective ocean governance system. This has been done through major international treaties and conventions, through the operation of global and regional organisations, and through national ocean management efforts. How good have been the results? Are we moving in the right direction? What can we learn from the failures as well as successes? Will the twentieth-century efforts survive into the twenty-first century or must we change directions? Policy analysts should always ask questions concerning how well we have done before proposing policies for the future. But a change in century is a particularly good time for a stock-taking. That is the purpose of this paper. It attempts to ask the question — are we headed in the right direction? This is important to help correct errors and also may force us to recognise that the context of future ocean policy in the next century may be sufficiently different to cause us to rethink our priorities.1While no one has a crystal ball, it can be argued that the twentieth century really ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and that we must face an array of new problems in the future caused by the diffusion of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons to smaller states and `rogue’ movements, globalization of the world economy, significant changes in the scope of world communications and transportation, an increase in violent conflict at the national and subnational level, and a continued decline in the worldʹs natural capital. In addition, policy-makers in the twenty-first century will inherit the intractable problem of developing states poverty.