A Ministry for the Ocean

How do we govern the?ocean?

This week we are introducing a concept that advocates for a centralized Ministry for the Ocean, a voice at the highest level of government to champion for ocean policy and protection.

As we look to the future, and the preeminence of the world ocean in relation to all aspects of human life, this becomes the essential question. In a January 2022 article in The Conversation UK, Chris Armstrong, Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, advocates for a centralized Ministry for the Ocean, a voice at the highest level of government to advocate for ocean policy and protection.

His basic argument is that there is no agency to keep the ocean in the forefront of political life. “By giving a minister of the ocean a seat in the cabinet, governments would send a powerful signal about the coming blue century, and put a clear vision for a sustainable ocean economy and flourishing marine ecosystems at the heart of their work.”

If we take the United States as an example, we will discover 14 Departments and 6 Agencies that are represented at the highest cabinet level, responsible to the President, coordinated by the Chief of Staff. They are: State, Defense, Treasury, the Attorney General, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, and Homeland Security. The Agencies are: Environmental Protection, Management and Budget, United Nations Mission, Council of Economic Advisors, and Small Business Administration.

If you look closely at any one, you can see the obvious ocean areas of jurisdiction that relate to the foreseeable roll of marine interest and development: trade and transportation, security, food production, climate and coastal protections, community health, work force development, education and professional training, environmental regulation, international treaties and law, national and international finance, budget, and legislation, among others. In bureaucratic language, these organizations are “silos,” structures acting independently, vertically, linked at the top of the leadership pyramid, where presumably a coherent presidential vision oversees their priorities and integration.

What is missing, at least structurally difficult to find, are “crosscutting” connections, where programs are envisioned, financed, and implemented, horizontally, as an integrated strategy engaging all aspects of the initiative through all elements of all agencies. Such connection would protect against duplication, contradiction, convention, and inertia from one department to another.

Inter-agency connection, coordinated by an Ocean Minister or Department Secretary, could anticipate policy and program conflict: industrial agriculture waste disposal, for example, in coastal areas to preclude growing dead zones where fisheries and other maritime enterprise cannot thrive. Or targeted or re-allocated tax incentives shifted from support of conventional energy to alternatives, of extraction to conservation, of consumption to sustainability. Many of the ocean related programs that languish within existing bureaucracy could be transferred to this new silo where they would have focus, standing, funds, and a co-equal seat at the cabinet table.

If a national leader has an ocean consciousness, a prescient awareness of the fulsome, essential immediacy of ocean resource value, then that interest might begin to shape overt interest and inclination. In 2018, during the Obama Administration, the United States flirted with the creation of a national ocean policy, a national ocean council, and a congressional ocean caucus, as a rekindling of ocean interest following the failure of two national ocean plan initiatives that languished from the Bush era. What followed, however, in the next presidency, was abandonment of interest, thus little or no action. The drafts of those plans remain; there is much to be valued within them, a basic structure and outline for a new ocean focus that could be re-started tomorrow if there could be found the political will.

On Earth Day this year, at the UN Ocean Conference in New York, the US publicly committed to a variety of actions with regard to illegal, unreported, unregulated fishing, to food security initiatives, to increased coastal research and science by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency, to further US participation in the mapping of the ocean floor, to an international alliance to combat ocean acidification, to a strategy to prevent further plastic pollution, and to financial commitments of some $16 billion to ocean technology, climate mitigation, and other tangible steps toward a quiet, coordinated ocean plan. There was a White House press release but not much other notice. No matter; it may be that a voice for the ocean at the highest level, of a minister, has been found.

PETER NEILL is founder and director of the World Ocean Observatory, a web-based place of exchange for information and educational services about the health of the world ocean. He is also host of World Ocean Radio, upon which this blog is inspired. World Ocean Radio celebrates 15 years this year, with more than 645 episodes produced to date.

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