How are oceans governed?

Human geographer Prof. Dr Kimberley Peters, head of the Marine Governance Research Group at HIFMB Oldenburg and professor at the University of Oldenburg.

Marine Governance

Marine Protection

Marine Management

The ocean is a unique space.  In addition to coastal areas subject to national law and jurisdictions, the largest areas of the oceans - the High Seas - are exempt. The mobile, fluid, and dynamic nature of the international waters makes them difficult to govern with familiar structures. But just because the areas seem remote, they are not disconnected from people and places on land. Through currents, through the atmosphere, and through our own mobility, the oceans are permanently connected to us in a complex web of relations.

But how might the oceans be governed? This is what we are investigating at HIFMB, a collaboration between the University of Oldenburg and AWI, in the Marine Governance Group - here the first research cluster to focus specifically on social science and humanities approaches to marine biodiversity and ocean management. Our group thus also follows the Institute's strong interdisciplinary approach of bringing together the human and natural sciences. Our work critically examines management and policy techniques, with the goal of unravelling how governance happens, in order to ask how we might govern better. We want to explore how current modes of governance have come to be, unpacking and disrupting the taken-for-granted assumptions that shape (the often territorial) management of the seas and oceans, examining the ways in which power is exercised at sea. Our research also considers how to increase public engagement to build greater understanding of biodiversity change and build sustainable ocean futures.