Maritime Governance

We left the story of maritime governance acknowledging that much remained to be done, and although many were contributing to resolving global problems and much had been achieved, some fundamental issues still had to be addressed. This book attempts to move the discussion further on and to suggest ways that policy-makers and those responsible for the design of maritime governance can improve upon what we have. We will venture into the dark world of the maritime administrator, shipowner, media company and politician in an attempt to unfathom the inadequacies of maritime governance, digging deep into the philosophical contexts of form, flow, time, speed and process. This chapter proceeds to examine the characteristics and problems that remain with maritime governance, in particular those relating to nation-states, institutions, the narrow definition of stakeholders, shipowner domination and the absence of fluidity in policy-making.

The problems that characterise the maritime sector are constantly developing, and if there is one feature of the shipping and port industry that remains consistent, it is that it is always changing. Apart from the obvious nature of the maritime industry in that it centres upon the movement of goods and people (and consequently ships) around the world, it also displays many other features of constant change. Thus, major maritime problems such as environmental degradation, low safety standards, security violations and issues of commercial efficiency do not stand still but either by nature constantly reflect differing failures or are part of a moving programme of events deliberately manipulated by those central to the industry. The structure and development of maritime governance has failed to reflect this and instead has been characterised by institutional stasis and regulations, and rules and policy directives that are designed for a single point in time. Maritime governance is incessantly chasing maritime problems, failures and inadequacies generated by the shipping industry as it operates to its own strict commercial principles, taking advantage of any anachronisms in policy that have developed since their last revision. Maritime governance needs to address a requirement to be flexible in its institutional structures, in the vehicles it uses to face these problems, in the agencies that deliver the policies that emerge and in the nature of the measures actually taken. There is also a need to understand the difference between the current static governance and the dynamic governance that could meet these needs. This requires at the outset to address the issue of form—a central feature of the static approach to policy that its formal position currently takes. This chapter looks at the static nature of maritime governance and its focus upon form rather than process. It concludes with a discussion of the related concepts of path dependency and lock-in and their relationship to policy-making for shipping.

To understand the movement from form to process in maritime policy-making and governance, there is a need to understand more fully the concept of change. This in turn has a close relationship to time. No revolutionary dynamic governance which accommodates the ever-changing characteristics of policy-making and the maritime industry can avoid taking account of temporal issues. Therefore, time is next on the agenda. This chapter looks at the concept of time in the past, present and future and the relationship it has to maritime governance. It continues with a discussion of time and space and the idea of the many different times that co-exist. It concludes by looking at time, form, process and governance and their inter-relationships in the maritime sector.

Starting from the premise that one of the causes of failure in maritime governance comes from its static nature, our examination of the significance of form in policy-making and governance has led us to consider the role of time and how its incorporation might be a significant ingredient in overcoming the lack of movement that characterises governance of the sector, something that as far back as Galileo might have seemed unacceptable. This chapter focuses upon process and the need for a more fluid and flexible approach to maritime governance. After discussing the origins, significance and context for process as a central part of maritime governance, it goes on to compare this with the current ‘snapshot’ approach upon which maritime policy-makers tend to rely. The issues of form, object and flow are then introduced along with change and governance and the potential offered by a process approach. The chapter concludes with a consideration of the variety of process models that might be applied to the redefinition of maritime governance.

The discussion of process and its significant relationship to meaningful and effective governance remains incomplete. Several issues that will help in the clarification of how governance processes can be improved can be identified and thereafter we can begin to move into others that have remained neglected by governance and policy-making in the maritime sector—flow and speed. Following that we can begin to draw together the threads of the discussion to see where maritime governance finds itself in the dynamic world of globalisation and pressures that exist that constrain and determine its effectiveness. In this chapter, we consider issues of process philosophy, process transfer, convergence and learning, the significance of metaphors in an understanding of process and particularly the role of nomadology, process complexity, dispersion and concentration, and the application of global fluids. Maritime governance may seem far from such issues but has a lot to take from the wider debate on dynamism and the concepts which characterise it, much as it might wish to hide away in the safety of commercialism and pragmatism.

And finally to speed, seen by some as important to politics and policy-making as wealth and necessitating a political economy of speed. We have come a long way from the static perception of maritime governance, passing through various concepts which have become increasingly mobile—change, process, flow—and now arrived at our ultimate destination. Cruising at speed in a way that reflects how the world now works and how the maritime sector needs to be viewed. When we have completed our tour of the dynamism of governance, we can move on to the last chapter where we have a number of issues to consider, not least some models of change in governance, the contradictions that shipping exhibits and their impact upon the governance and policy-making process, and to place it all in context. This chapter has to focus on the work of Paul Virilio but also looks at speed and space, power and policy-making in some detail as considered by others, concluding with a discussion of equilibrium in governance.

For those of you brave enough to have survived to this stage, perhaps it is time to emphasise where we are trying to go. The discussion has circled around the issues that define governance and in fact could have been applied to many other sectors than the maritime. Far from an accident, this is a deliberate strategy in attempting to illustrate that governance should be considered in a much wider context than is conventional in the maritime sector, where it has become focussed almost entirely upon ownership and the issues that stem from this. A result of an obsession with privatisation that characterised the maritime sector as much as any other in the 1970s and 1980s, it has taken central place in the discussion of governance at the expense of issues which are more substantial and thus important to any and every sector; issues discussed both in this book and its predecessor Maritime Governance and Policy-Making. Whilst the issue of private or public ownership is significant in determining the effectiveness of the maritime sector, it is more important to understand the underlying issues that have been going on in terms of globalisation, the Postmodern revolution, change, fluidity and process and the relationship that exists between them and the stagnant and immobile characteristics of policy-making in the maritime industry. This stasis and its contrast to the changes taking place within the shipping industry and more widely has generated the problems identified earlier in safety, security, the environment and efficiency, and unless addressed, these will not go away, regardless of the efforts of policy-makers and the quantity or quality of policies produced. This final chapter begins with a trawl through what others have said and how this can help understand the changes needed and the environment within which governance has to operate. It goes on to look closely at one approach that might have validity—time geography—borrowed from the Swedish (Lund) School of Geography before placing all of the discussion in a framework derived from David Harvey (Seventeen contradictions and the end of capitalism. Profile Books, London 2014) contradictions for capitalism. Finally, we look ahead.