3.1 Business as usual – Managing complexity
The Business as Usual (BAU) scenario is based on the current status quo
predicting that global oceans governance will continue to face highly
interconnected and multifaceted problems. The three major risks of the
impacts of the overexploitation of marine resources, inequitable
distribution of access to and benefits from marine ecosystem services,
and inadequate or inappropriate adaptation to changing ocean conditions
are partially addressed by some actors, but efforts to address issues
related to ocean conservation will not start soon enough and will not be
sufficient to place ocean use and exploitation on a sustainable footing
(Duarte et al. 2020). Human pressure on marine ecosystems will increase
to meet the growing demand for goods and services (Halpern et al. 2020;
FAO 2020), and exploitation of marine resources will receive the most
attention from government institutions (Sumaila et al. 2019).
The distribution of benefits
and/or costs will continue to be recognised as an important topic of
discussion in national and international fora. However, it will be
difficult for actors with different economic interests (e.g. developed
and developing states) to agree on solutions that address inequities
(Shelton 2008). Adapting to changing ocean conditions will be difficult,
due to lags between impacts and policy responses (Blasiak 2020,
Slawinski et al. 2017). Knowledge
gaps about the oceans such as in species distribution (Menegotto and
Rangel, 2018) will persist and these knowledge gaps will undermine
prospects for evidence- and knowledge-based decision making (Columbus
2016).
Positive developments will include the widespread adoption of some key
international oceans agreements, such as the United Nations Fish Stock
Agreement (UNFSA), which is ratified by most countries that harvest
straddling and highly migratory fish stocks (United Nations Treaty
Collection 2020). The MARPOL
Convention - the International Convention for the Prevention of
Pollution from Ships – will further reduce vessel-based marine
pollution. The draft convention for the conservation and sustainable use
of Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) will enter into
force but will lack broad implementation and enforcement capacity as
states struggled to reach an agreement (de Santo et al. 2020, Cremers et
al. 2020). However, the
implementation of the BBNJ agreement will likely be accompanied by an
increase in establishing high seas marine protected areas. Besides
marine protected areas there will be a growing use of marine spatial
planning as a management strategy, which will result in a more coherent
ocean management strategies, even though conceptual and practical
challenges will remain (Santos et al. 2019).
Formal rules, policies and institutions for oceans management at the
national level will continue to be developed or modified iteratively.
However, these rules will remain poorly integrated across sectors,
resulting in gaps and missed opportunities in addressing the three key
risks (Vince 2015). Implementation, compliance, and enforcement will
remain patchy, due to lack of resources (Vince et al. 2017) and
political will (Nilsson et al. 2019). Governance actors’ main priority
will be economic growth, promoting, for example, harmful subsidies,
which further contributes to overfishing (Sumaila et al 2019).
Moreover, the direction of funding
towards economy-oriented aspirations may lead to funding cuts for basic
research and capacity development or may influence research topics and
direction.
Key governance decisions will not make the best use of existing
scientific, indigenous, and traditional knowledge (Pentz and Klenk 2017,
Weiss et al 2012). With the need for increased evidence-based decision
making, new challenges related to data sharing, protection and
management will emerge (e.g. Intellectual Property), leaving important
information hidden, unavailable or overlooked. Investments in government
infrastructure and capacity will remain low, especially in developing
nations and small island states, resulting in reliance on outdated
research technologies. Despite growing efforts, gaps in knowledge and
governance capacity between developed and developing countries will
continue, limiting our adaptive and collective responses to ocean
governance challenges (Chiarolla 2016).
In a BAU scenario, few parties will acknowledge the need for change, and
climate change induced impacts such as redistribution of important
species will lead to increased conflicts (Mendenhall et al. 2020).
Legitimacy and trust will remain essential for co-governance across
scales, but their development will continue to be difficult (Turner et
al 2017). Thus, while system-wide legitimacy in some parts of ocean
governance may slowly increase at globally significant decision-making
meetings, less influential stakeholders will still struggle to speak up
and be heard. For example, indigenous and traditional stakeholders will
increasingly participate in global meetings as a result of international
pressure for improved legitimacy and transparency, but their influence
on the meetings’ outcomes will remain limited (Weiss et al 2013). As a
result, the ocean will continue to be governed by a small elite (whose
composition varies depending on fluctuating alliances), with members
having trade powers and rights of exploitation but different perceptions
and understandings of environmental risks and fairness.
Media will play an important role in influencing ocean users and coastal
communities (McCombst 2002; Soroka 2003) and will not always make use of
the latest scientific evidence (Boykoff 2008). In addition, there will
remain a lack of investment in capacity and key infrastructure for
communities that are exposed to sea-level rise, oil and gas pollution
and other ecological impacts resulting in poor adaptive capacity and
high transaction costs for sustainable resource use and collective
actions. While some companies will be role models in sustainable
resource use, most will participate in “blue-washing” activities
(Voyer et al. 2018). For example, deep-seabed mining companies are
promoting themselves as sustainable, less invasive and vital to a
low-carbon and green-tech based future, despite the potential for vast
ecological damage of the industry to seabed ecosystems (Cuvelier et al.
2018; Levin et al. 2016).
3.2 Sustainable 2030 –Embracing complexity
Following the approach described in section 2 and by Nash et al. 2020,
we explored different future scenarios. Scenario parameters were set by
the project teams – see Nash et al. 2020. The scenario drivers and
narratives for this paper were developed iteratively through several
workshops and discussions by team members identify drivers, constraints
and opportunities for the two scenarios elaborated here. Our vision of a
More Sustainable Future embraces the complexity of ocean governance and
moves towards reducing the three major risks. Unlike non-place
management, place management takes into account the distinctive features
of an individual place and customize management measures and regulations
specific to that place (Young et al. 2007). Adoption and implementation
of place-based management and precautionary approaches, together with
increased public awareness of ocean overexploitation, will lead to
improvements in managing resource use and impacts. A realisation of the
need to address social inequity will lead to transformations in
cooperation on ocean issues and capacity to adapt to changes in the
ocean (Coscieme et al. 2020; Díaz et al. 2019).
In a sustainable 2030 future scenario, new operational rules that
complement or reform existing laws will be developed and implemented.
Together, these rules will build a more holistic and strategic
framework. They will be informed by ambitious objectives shared across
players and will be better equipped to address the challenge of
fragmented ocean governance. The BBNJ agreement will provide a starting
point to address increased pressures from deep-sea resource use. Even
though the BBNJ agreement was established on the principle of “not
undermining” existing organizations and initiatives, the outcome of the
BBNJ negotiations rather strengthens than undermine existing
organization (Gjerde et al. 2019). The increasing availability of
resources and management capacity will improve compliance and
enforcement. Institutional coordination and cooperation between
national, sub-national, and local communities will improve sustainable
practices and will lead to coordinated efforts to close managerial and
regulatory loopholes.
A broader range of organisations and actors will contribute to
decisions. Decision-making will be guided by the best available
scientific, indigenous, and traditional knowledge. The use of technology
will improve monitoring, control and surveillance, and will support more
equitable use of ocean resources. Better use of indigenous and
traditional knowledge in planning and decision making will improve the
legitimacy of ocean governance. Increased transparency will improve the
availability of data, will allow scrutiny of decisions and actions, will
reduce information asymmetry among actors, and will improve trust
amongst important communities and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO)
stakeholders. This will lay the foundation for ongoing negotiations to
continue improving and adapting ocean governance over time.
Focused research will advance our understanding of ocean processes.
Research will be supported by local communities organised as citizen
scientists. Policymakers will use improved research and crowd-sourced
data in their strategic planning, emergency preparedness, and adaptive
management. Through technological advances, local communities will be
empowered to participate in monitoring coastal environments against
illegal, unreported and unregulated activities, pollution, and sea-level
rise. As more local communities and civil society will be engaged in
policy and decision-making, their commitment to better oceans management
will be strengthened. This will lay the foundations for consensus or
acceptable compromises regarding global ocean management goals which
will, in time, lead to international commitments.
Pathway to achieve
sustainable 2030
Through the lens of agency, we identified 40 actions across the five
drivers to address the three risks highlighted by the Sustainable
Development Goals and thus likely leading towards our vision of the
sustainable future (Figure 1). We grouped these actions and provide a
brief description in the next section (see Appendix 1 for a full list of
actions). A clear challenge in moving from a business as usual
trajectory is the complex interactions among actors in shaping
institutional action or non-action. Enhancing agency of actors such as
first nations peoples, whose interests are under-, or non-represented,
through engagement and capacity building is a key here.