This study examines how the work of the International Law Commission (ILC) has contributed to the ‘progressive development’ of general international law relevant to regulating rescue and disembarkation of refugees and migrants found at sea. It explores the ILC’s texts on interpretation and implementation of international obligations, state responsibility, fragmentation and harmonization of international law, and the status of certain principles of general international law, including jus cogens general principles of law and the principle of good faith, which present legal parameters for regulation of maritime search and rescue operations. In conducting doctrinal examinations of international law and gathering evidence of the practice of States and other relevant actors, the ILC contributes by analysing, clarifying, and systemising important topics of general international law. However, state implementation frequently falls short of the legal interpretations of the ILC, particularly as they relate to respect for and protection of human rights at sea. Therefore, while the ILC needs new strategies to directly connect with States and international organisations, it remains reliant on the mutual following of national and international courts and tribunals, and its mutual contribution in scholarship.
Once known as an example of state collapse, Somali territories today see a number of competing public administrations, which, as this book argues, depend on a dynamic trade sector for revenues. Riffing on Tilly’s idea that ‘war makes states,’ the authors argue instead that ‘trade makes states,’ that the facilitation and capture of commodity flows have been instrumental in making and unmaking state-projects across the Somali territories. The volume draws on multi-sited research of everyday economic life along trade corridors in Somali East Africa, including parts of Kenya and Ethiopia. It examines how government officials, informal traders, militias, local businessmen, international investors, and donors feed into systems of regulatory control in ports, at marketplaces, and along transport corridors. Contributions to the volume draw attention to the ingenuities of transnational Somali trade and the ‘politics of circulation,’ providing important insights into contemporary state formation on the margins of global supply chain capitalism.
Small-scale fishing communities along Cambodia's coast have relied on marine resources as a mainstay of their livelihood for many decades. However, in the past 10 to 15 years, environmental change, increased fishing pressure, illegal, underreported, and unregulated fishing, and sand mining have contributed to a progressive decline in their catch. At the same time, economic opportunities outside the coastal village have acted as a draw and catalyzed migration to secondary cities and to the capital. This study examines out-migration of people from coastal communities to the city of Koh Kong. Using qualitative data collected from three fishing villages, I explore why people leave and why others stay in the village. In the context of city provisioning systems, the study also reveals a shift in climate-related vulnerability for coastal village migrants when they become urban residents. The study highlights the importance of looking not only at city planning, infrastructure challenges, and climate risks but also at the attendant social effects that phenomena such as migration have on people who are increasingly on the move. Such a perspective offers a more people-centred understanding of urban climate resilience in Cambodia, and potentially for other countries across Southeast Asia.
Fishing and sand mining in Cambodia may not appear to have much in common. However, digging deeper reveals important parallels. Both fishing and sand mining support livelihoods and are connected to a limited natural resource. Meanwhile, they are both typified by precarious livelihoods, on the one hand, and overexploitation, on the other. In bringing these two topics together, the paper combines empirical qualitative research from two separate studies conducted by the co-authors in Cambodia, one in coastal fishing villages and another in the sand mining industry along the Mekong River. We argue that the interplay between fishing and sand mining has paradoxical impacts on livelihoods, supporting one group while undermining another. Using a precarity analysis lens, we show how an unconventional, and largely invisible frontier of natural resource exploitation—sand mining—is intertwined with fisheries, and expands our understanding of the relationship between precarious labour, environmental change, and livelihoods.
The “Initial IMO Strategy” was adopted in the 72nd session of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC 72) of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in April 2018. It has set, among other things, ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from ships, and purports to express a strong political will to phase them out as soon as possible. The most ambitious of these targets is to reduce GHG emissions by 2050 at least 50% vis-à-vis 2008 levels, and there is also an intermediate target to reduce CO2 emissions per transport work by 2030 at least 40%, again vis-à-vis 2008 levels. More than three years since the adoption of the Initial IMO Strategy, this chapter takes stock at the status of shipping decarbonisation and attempts to assess prospects for the future. Obstacles towards achieving the IMO targets are identified and discussed.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the impact assessment of a mandatory operational goal-based short-term measure to reduce green house gas (GHG) emissions from ships. The specific measure has been proposed by Denmark and other co-sponsors in the context of the relevant discussion at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and in particular the so-called Initial IMO Strategy. The IMO is a specialized United Nations agency that regulates shipping. The Initial IMO Strategy, adopted in 2018, has been the most recent major international environmental agreement on how to reduce GHG emissions from ships at a global level. The central research question in this paper is to ascertain the potential impacts of the aforementioned measure to least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS). There are concerns that such states may be negatively impacted, or even disproportionately negatively impacted, by whatever measure is decided by the IMO. After gaps in the literature and data are identified, our methodology develops a list of potential negative impacts, and looks at a set of factors that may influence these impacts. Then, we discuss how the goal-based measure may impact LDCs/SIDs as regards each of the identified negative impacts. The analysis argues that for LDCs and SIDS a risk for negative and disproportionately negative impacts exists. The only negative impact of which both the probability and the consequence are considered high is the difficulty to finance retrofitting of old ships or investment in new ships. As such, this is likely a disproportionally negative impact. At the same time, the degree of share (or responsibility) of the goal-based measure with respect to such potential negative impacts, vis-à-vis the share of other factors contributing to these impacts, cannot be precisely ascertained, even though we conjecture this share to be low.
Marine space is overall under increasing pressure from human activities and in the way harming the marine ecosystems. Maritime spatial planning is one of the governance elements in the EU Integrated Maritime Policy (2007) that aims to maximize the sustainable use of the seas and oceans. Maritime spatial planning aims to ensure that the increased use of the marine space takes place in a way that is consistent with the sustainable development in the seas and oceans. According to the MSP Directive it is required to follow an ecosystem-based and thus holistic approach. For this to happen, tools are needed, and some tools are available but with various advantages and disadvantages. The aim of the current research has been to develop a comprehensive package of tools to assess the environmental impacts of societal activities under different maritime spatial planning proposals.
Maritime security is a major international concern with the Gulf of Guinea recognised as one of the global hotspots of blue crime, such as piracy, kidnap for ransom, trafficking of narcotics, human and arms, and illegal fishing. The complex and complicated challenge of maritime security, a wicked problem, calls for inter-agency coordination, synergy of efforts and scaling up of responses. Given the complexity of maritime security threats, no single organisation has the institutional muscle to single-handedly deal with it. Drawing on evidence from Ghana, where the arrival of maritime security as a concept triggered a shift from single to a multi-agency approach to dealing with maritime issues, the article examines the potential of and challenges associated with inter-agency coordination. In line with recent international developments, African nations like Ghana aim to apply the concept of inter-agency coordination to tackle maritime insecurity in its waters. The paper assesses how inter-agency coordination could be used in an African maritime security governance context, while examining power imbalance, strife for agency autonomy and other obstacles that have to be addressed to ensure that the promises associated with the concept are fulfilled.
Decentralization of the electricity sector has mainly been studied in relation to its infrastructural aspect, particularly location and size of the generation units, and only recently more attention has been paid to the governance aspects. This article examines power sector (de)centralization operationalized along three functional dimensions: political, administrative and economic. We apply this framework to empirically assess the changes in California’s electricity market, which saw the emergence of institutional innovation in the form of community choice aggregation (CCA). Unpacking the Californian case illustrates how decision-making has moved from central state government and regulators to the municipal level in uneven ways and without decentralized generation keeping pace. We also explore the impacts this multidimensional and diversified decentralization has on the ultimate goals of energy transition: decarbonization and energy security. Our framework and empirical findings challenge the conventional view on decentralization and problematize the widespread assumptions of its positive influence on climate mitigation and grid stability.
With growing pressures on marine ecosystems and on marine space, an increasingly needed strategy to optimize the use of marine space is to co-locate synergic marine human uses in close spatial–temporal proximity while separating conflicting marine human uses. The ArcMap toolbox SEANERGY is a new, cross-sectoral spatial decision support tool (DST) that enables maritime spatial planners to consider synergies and conflicts between marine uses to support assessments of co-location options. Cross-sectoral approaches are important to reach more integrative maritime spatial planning (MSP) processes. As this article demonstrates through a Baltic Sea analysis, SEANERGY presents a crosssectoral use catalog for MSP through enabling the tool users to answer important specific questions to spatially and/or numerically weight potential synergies/conflicts between marine uses. The article discusses to what degree such a cross-sectoral perspective can support integrative MSP processes. While MSP integrative challenges still exist, SEANERGY enables MSP processes to move towards developing shared goals and initiate discussions built on best available knowledge regarding potential use-use synergies and use-use conflicts for whole sea basins at once.