International Organizations and the Protection of the Marine Environment

One response to the numerous governance challenges faced with respect to the oceans, a shared space, is the creation of international organizations. Typically comprising of representations from member States and with pre-defined mandates, international organizations strive to resolve specific issues. This chapter will provide a categorical overview of these organizations and examine how they operate in isolation, as well as interact with each other, in striving to protect the marine environment. Given the institutional complexity surrounding the individual regimes that create them, the outcomes arrived at by most international organizations occasionally do not represent the collective interests of all member States. Nevertheless, the existence of a common avenue in which marine environmental problems can be raised and discussed as a whole has indeed resulted in the adoption of notable measures to address those problems. Such outcomes would not have been possible without the mechanics that are peculiar to international organizations. Ultimately, this analysis demonstrates the extent to which international organizations formulate the law of the sea and discern some patterns on how their efforts has advanced the protection of the marine environment in recent years.