Institutional and policy cocktails for protecting coastal and marine environments from land-based sources of pollution

The ecological integrity of coastal and near-shore environments is at the mercy of social, business, institutional and regulatory norms that dictate human behavior—not just at sea, but on land. The state of coastal lagoons, estuaries, harbours, semi-closed seas, and even the open ocean, is a mirror of anthropogenic activities on land that: (i) alter or destroy habitat; (ii) pollute groundwater, creeks and rivers that drain into the sea; and (iii) fill the atmosphere with particulates that settle on the sea. Land-based activities, such as mining, clearing vegetation for building roads, homes and hotels, destroy critical habitat and cloud river systems and estuaries with mud and silt. Since the broad range of land-based activities has a cumulative impact on coastal and marine environments, the sustainable development and protection of such environments pose challenges that demand multidisciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches and require far more than tough sanctions to punish the environmental “bad guys”. aper reviews the strengths and weaknesses of regulatory and non-regulatory options available to governments to manage the destructive and polluting activities of their citizens in coastal and marine environments. It considers the challenge of mixing these options and advocates for a strategic “cocktail” of instruments that best suit respective natural, cultural, constitutional and economic scenarios. The paper discourages rushing towards a single untested alternative to traditional command-and-control regulation, but to incrementally experiment with a variety of instruments and combinations thereof. Governments should avoid the tendency to treat various policy instruments as alternatives to one another rather than as potentially complimentary mechanisms. These may include improved regulation, tradable permits, discharge fees and voluntary programmes. The process of incremental experimentation with regulatory alternatives should be paralleled by timely and comprehensive evaluation of effectiveness, efficiency, and their relationship with other components of the broader system. This is the philosophy underpinning the development of National Programmes of Action as required by the 1995 Global Programme of Action for the Protection of the Marine Environment from Land-based Activities (GPA).