Routledge Handbook of National and Regional Ocean Policies Edited by Biliana Cicin-Sain, David L. VanderZwaag and Miriam C. Balgos Published by Routledge eBook edition, 2015 ISBN: 978-1-315-76564-8 682 pages To write a review in 2021 of a book first published in 2015 may seem like an unusual activity. The reasons for the delayed review are two-fold. Firstly, this review aims to test the continuing utility of the handbook, which endeavours to ‘provide succinct lessons learned and emerging best practices, which are directly relevant to the growing number of nations and regions that are also beginning to pursue integrated ocean policies’, and that ‘should be useful to governmental, non-governmental, and private sector practitioners involved in ocean and coastal management around the world, as well as to graduate and undergraduate students in marine and environmental policy.’ Secondly, this review aims to assess if, during the interregnum between the date of the book’s publication and now, the acknowledgement by the book’s contributors that ‘the pace at which management and governance of
the oceans is proceeding does not match the pace of the degradation of the marine environment and its resources’ has occurred, and to assess the impact of this on the ongoing utility of the handbook. The book is one of the main products of an international programme of research on national and regional ocean policies underwritten by philanthropic funding from the Nippon Foundation. The programme spanned from 2004 to 2007. During this time, the programme undertook two workshops in Tokyo and New York in 2004, and an international meeting, ‘The Ocean Policy Summit: International Conference on Integrated Ocean Policy: National and Regional Experiences, Prospects, and Emerging Practices’ (TOPS) in Lisbon in 2005. The aims of the programme were to: • ‘develop a framework for cross-national analysis of national and regional ocean policies, and for drawing lessons useful to other cases in other countries/regions’; • ‘carry out systematic comparative analyses of national and regional ocean policies in a selected number of countries/ regions on principles embodied, institutional arrangements, and other governance variables’; • ‘draw lessons from the comparative analyses and develop suggested guidance for other nations/regions contemplating national/regional ocean policy formulation and implementation’; and • ‘disseminate the results of the research work broadly’. The book was edited by three internationally recognised marine
www.sut.org
law and policy practitioners: Biliana Cicin-Sain, Director of the Gerard J. Mangone Center for Marine Policy and Professor of Marine Policy at the University of Delaware; David L. VanderZwaag, Professor of Law and the Canada Research Chair in Ocean Law and Governance at the Marine and Environmental Law Institute, Dalhousie University, Canada; and Miriam C. Balgos, Associate Scientist at the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, University of Delaware, and Program Coordinator for the Global Ocean Forum. The three editors were part of a sixty-strong mixture of international academics and practitioners in the areas of marine law and ocean policy. That pool included expertise from Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Portugal, Russian Federation, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam. Contributors to the book were also drawn from four regional organisations: East Asian Seas, the European Union, Pacific Islands and SubSaharan Africa. The contents of the handbook comprise twenty-one chapters and four appendices. The chapters are divided into: Part I: Introduction (Chapters 1 to 2); Part II: National Ocean Policies (Chapters 3 to 17); and Part III: Regional Ocean Policies (Chapters 18 to 21). The practice of, and research into, ocean governance continues to grow exponentially, with an increased interest in careers in this area by new entry job seekers. Since the publication of this book in 2015, there has been a significant interest in the development and application of
Book Review
doi:10.3723/ut.38.025 Underwater Technology, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 25–26, 2021
25
