Governing the Marine Environment through Information: Fisheries, Shipping, and Tourism

Collective self-governance in a marine community: expedition cruise tourism at Svalbard

“…Second, the user community organized itself in an industry association to prevent intervention or stricter regulations imposed by the policy community (I-M-5, I-M-8). In a sense, AECO created this information-driven industry association within the user community to safeguard their social license to operate and preserve their reputational capital (Toonen & Mol, 2016).…”

Marine communities : governing oil & gas activities and cruise tourism in the Arctic and the Caribbean

“…Similar to findings for shipping and fisheries (Toonen and Mol, 2016), AECO gained value chain power as leading industry association through its information systems. To avoid further reinforcement of AECO's power, the Governor withdrew from a true state-industry partnership.…”

“…Subsequently, accumulation of state and non-state information systems both for rule compliance and scientific purposes, competition between the interests and organisations behind these information systems (Miller and Bush, 2015), and little coordination or harmonisation between them was observed. The expedition crew, who have to implement all information systems, experienced an information overflow that generated confusion and undermined the credibility and effectiveness of the information systems as well as the information providers behind them (Toonen and Mol, 2016). This information overflow resulted in a trade-off between investing time and resources in information systems on activities and the actual activity itself.…”

“…Second, the user community organised itself into an industry association to prevent intervention or stricter regulations imposed by the policy community (I-M-38, I-M-41). In a sense, AECO created this information-driven industry association within the user community to safeguard their SLO and preserve their reputational capital (Toonen and Mol, 2016). Since its establishment, the network structure of AECO has reinforced its power as strong pan-Arctic organisation, as its members represent the industry at different events and grant the AECO secretariat access to their expertise and resources.…”

“…Marine communities should be studied first in relation to other maritime activities because the maritime activity had a larger influence on environmental governance than the marine region in which it occurred. Fisheries and shipping may be a good starting point, as both maritime activities have been key economic sectors for coastal nations and are much older practices than the relatively young maritime activities of cruise tourism and offshore oil and gas production (Toonen and Mol, 2016). The governance of fisheries by marine communities might be different than that of oil & gas activities and cruise tourism for the following reasons: strong involvement of fishermen as local resource users, strong involvement of not-for-profit organisations and the reliance on different market-based governance tools, e.g.…”