Amplifying ocean commons: pathways for scaling transformative governance

The ocean economy has exponentially expanded since the early 2000s, revealing how business-as-usual governance in the form of privatization and fragmented state strategies are insufficient for ensuring social justice and sustainability.

Common property rights models – or commons - offer promising and transformative solutions for radically reforming ocean governance around shared rights, responsibilities and benefits to align stewardship and use. However, what remains unknown, is the viability, desirability and feasibility of commons as a scalable strategy.

Answering these questions is urgent at all levels.

Globally, the United Nations High Seas Treaty (adopted March 2023) mandates governing the high seas as a global commons, but with no clear governance pathways.

Regionally, over 191 fragmented governance arrangements address transboundary issues but lack coordination and integration.

Nationally, Blue Economy agendas are boosting growth without clear frameworks to deal with trade-offs, justice or sustainability.

Locally, capacities are lacking for collective action, risk sharing and adaptation to climate and market changes.SharedSeas examines the viability, desirability and feasibility of using common property rights as a sustainable and scalable ocean governance model.

It builds the conceptual and theoretical foundations of how a commons-based Blue Economy can realistically function and scale (WP1).

Empirical social-ecological analysis will extract lessons, challenges and best practices across multi-level cases (WP2).

Transdisciplinary participatory methods with diverse stakeholders will be developed to co-create future scenarios and pathways to address trade-offs (WP3).

To scale impact, SharedSeas has the ambitious goal to theoretically develop and empirically test eight pathways from amplification theory (stabilizing, speeding up, growing, spreading, transferring, replicating, scaling up, scaling deep) as avenues to mainstream commons in the Blue Economy (WP4).