Amplifying ocean commons: pathways for scaling transformative governance

Introduction

The ocean economy has exponentially expanded since the early 2000s, revealing how business-as-usual governance in the form of privatization and fragmented state strategies are insufficient for ensuring social justice and sustainability.

Challenges in Ocean Governance

Common property rights models – or commons - offer promising and transformative solutions for radically reforming ocean governance around shared rights, responsibilities, and benefits to align stewardship and use. However, what remains unknown is the viability, desirability, and feasibility of commons as a scalable strategy.

Urgency of the Questions

Answering these questions is urgent at all levels:

1. Globally: The United Nations High Seas Treaty (adopted March 2023) mandates governing the high seas as a global commons, but with no clear governance pathways.
2. Regionally: Over 191 fragmented governance arrangements address transboundary issues but lack coordination and integration.
3. Nationally: Blue Economy agendas are boosting growth without clear frameworks to deal with trade-offs, justice, or sustainability.
4. Locally: Capacities are lacking for collective action, risk sharing, and adaptation to climate and market changes.

Project Overview

SharedSeas examines the viability, desirability, and feasibility of using common property rights as a sustainable and scalable ocean governance model.

Objectives

It builds the conceptual and theoretical foundations of how a commons-based Blue Economy can realistically function and scale (WP1).

Methodology

Empirical social-ecological analysis will extract lessons, challenges, and best practices across multi-level cases (WP2).

Stakeholder Engagement

Transdisciplinary participatory methods with diverse stakeholders will be developed to co-create future scenarios and pathways to address trade-offs (WP3).

Scaling Impact

To scale impact, SharedSeas has the ambitious goal to theoretically develop and empirically test eight pathways from amplification theory:

1. Stabilizing
2. Speeding up
3. Growing
4. Spreading
5. Transferring
6. Replicating
7. Scaling up
8. Scaling deep

These pathways are avenues to mainstream commons in the Blue Economy (WP4).