A Critical Assessment of the Contribution of Integrated Ocean Management to Protection of the Marine Environment

Abstract

This dissertation interrogates how integrated ocean management contributes to protection of the marine environment. This is analyzed through three papers that discuss three cross-cutting themes: (1) Disentangling and structuring abstract and practical variants of integrated ocean management; (2) Identifying ways of approaching and concretizing protection of the marine environment as a management objective; (3) How to assess the contribution of integrated ocean management to protection of the marine environment. These themes capture concepts, objectives, and problems that are important premises for law and governance of the oceans.

Facing the complexities of “governance” and of societal objectives, integrated ocean management and other variants of integrated approaches to ocean management or ocean governance offer a single lens through which to condense or abstract vast amounts of information with conflicting premises. Therefore, it becomes important to specify which issues integrated approaches can resolve and which issues are excluded or marginalized.

This dissertation approaches protection of the marine environment by means of a problem analysis (a macroanalysis) of what the environmental objectives and problems of the ocean require. The analysis then specifies some problem aspects, which have implications for law and management. These problem aspects and implications are explored in a case study and a study of an illustrative ocean management mandate.

The dissertation concludes that the potential of (integrated) ocean management to contribute to protection of the marine environment is limited. Integrated ocean management primarily contributes to more restricted environmental objectives. The conclusion entails that preceding a claim that ocean management or governance contributes to protection of the marine environment should be an experimental explanation, perhaps resulting from a problem analysis, of how the ocean management mandate, instrument, or concept possibly responds to the environmental problems and approaches that protecting the marine environment demands.

Key words: integrated ocean management; ocean governance; integrated approach; marine spatial planning; marine environmental management; marine environmental protection; marine ecosystem governance; environmental management; marine governance; integrated marine policy