As a reaction to an increasing concern with the decreasing of standards in shipping during the 1970s and 1980s the International Maritime Organization adopted the ISM Code, which became mandatory in 1998. This study revisits the ISM Code, firstly exploring the genesis of the code at the international level, and then its operationalization at the national and local level. Based on a three-step case study, the interplay between the essence of the ISM Code and praxis onboard is explored. The study explores the distortion and erosion of the essence of the ISM Code when implemented on the national level in Danish law (step one) and by two Danishbased companies (step two) and finally investigates the local effect of the code as it is displayed onboard (step three).
The study is conducted as an applied socio-legal study; thus, it adopts both an internal (doctrinal) and an external (empirical) approach. It also combines the topdown and bottom-up perspective, consequently applying different methods to fit the content of the different levels examined, while maintaining a qualitative approach.
The research design is inspired by the hermeneutic circle. The first circle (Part I the international level) explores the genesis of the ISM Code, aim to explore the causal explanation for and to determine the essence of the ISM Code. The ‘essence’ is constituted by the ‘principles’ that the regulators intended to be essential to achieve ‘the purpose’. With Santos’s cartographic metaphor as a theoretical analytical framework combined with legal dogmatic method, the first part concentrates on small-scale legality (the international level). The second circle (Part II) is related to medium-scale legality (the national/transnational level). Part II explore the operationalisation of the ISM Code as it is implemented in Danish law, applying legal dogmatic method, combined with analyses of written formal communication to identify the inter-legality that distort the principles when implemented at a national level (step one and two). The third circle (Part III) relates to large-scale legality, applying Goffman’s theoretical framework to analyse the micro level, that constitute the onboard praxis. Praxis is compared with legislation, v revealing a frontstage behaviour that is compliant with regulation and documented by checklists, while in fact praxis deviate, ‘to make it work’ the crew exhibits what Goffman denoted a backstage behaviour.
The ISM Code introduces meta-regulation as a regulatory mechanism. Metaregulation is linked to Santos’s concept of globalization and governance matrix; the study applies Parker’s definition of meta-regulation and the triple loop to study the concept.
The study identifies three principles that constitute the essence of the ISM Code; (1) to establish a genuine link between the company and the flag State; (2) to ensure that the company becomes responsible for the ship’s operation; and (3) to empower the master, ensuring her or his authority. The analyses proved that each of the three principals were distorted at respectively meso and micro level, and that even though the intent was to promote good ship management, in reality it has provided companies the opportunity strut in borrowed plumes.
Ship recycling refers to the process of dismantling vessels with the purpose of extracting and recovering materials for reuse, particularly the steel. The aim of this paper is to map the supply chain of ship recycling. This exploratory and qualitative research provides a glimpse on how regulations influence the supply chain management through inter-organizational arrangements. It considers the trade-offs and combinations of financial and sustainable values that, in many ways, determine these inter-organizational arrangements. Preliminary findings show that there are conflicts of interest with the ship recycling stakeholders. Although compliance of regulations should foster better transparency in the supply chain, these regulations have not yet fully embraced social aspects, such as the fact that domestic demand and supply for steel, as well as many jobs, are dependent on this industry. On the contrary, the initiatives to regulate ship recycling might induce negative effects. This paper suggests that transaction costs analysis and the principal agency theory are two complementary theories for analyzing inter-organizational relationships in the supply chain of ship recycling.
A new motivation for marine restoration has been observed, associated with the dissatisfaction with current marine restoration governance arrangements (MRGAs). An MRGA consists of alliances of public and private actors (coalitions) who, through their common conceptualisation of the problem (discourses), try to influence and design marine restoration activities while considering the rules of decision-making, and the management of limited resources. Emerging MRGAs rise in parallel to existing ones and aim to contribute to the same goals or show another way of reaching those goals. This phenomenon raises questions of legitimacy both for the emerging and the existing arrangement. Building on existing literature, this paper proposes an analytical framework to simultaneously explore input, throughput and output legitimacy as three essential pre-conditions of legitimacy for MRGAs. The framework is tested in three European cases of MRGAs that were part of the European Union MERCES project (http://www.merces-project.eu/). Analysis showed that actors who are influential in achieving restoration goals, and also those who are impacted by restoration actions, should be involved in the MRGAs (input legitimacy); actors within MRGAs should establish and follow procedures for decision-making that are both transparent and clear (throughput legitimacy); and actors within MRGAs need to establish a common understanding of restoration, of the goal to reach and of the related uncertainties (output legitimacy). Awareness of these pre-conditions allows actors internal and external to MRGAs to address aspects that give legitimacy to restoration actions. It also creates a language that allows actors to engage in discussion on legitimacy that goes beyond the mere application of the rule of law.
Maritime medicine deals with the health of seafarers, fishermen, and offshore employees and, more specifically, with their employment, working and living conditions, and their health and safety at sea. Maritime doctors should have the appropriate training and competencies to provide the equivalent service as would be found on land. This review discusses a) the required skills and competencies of maritime doctors and b) explores the associated ongoing discussions for the establishment of a global accredited Masters programme in maritime health. A literature review was conducted using 2 databases: PubMed and Google scholar. Search terms included: maritime doctors, maritime medicine, occupational health, and skills and competencies. Literature published between 1990 and 2018 was prioritised. Thirty-five articles that discussed the skills, competencies, and education of maritime doctors and health professionals were retrieved, reviewed, and discussed, plus 8 reports and documents from relevant International Organisations webpages. We explored policies in relation to training using i) the health triangle and ii) the Kingdon model. Doctors who serve in the sector should have extensive knowledge about medical practice, but also about the environment of seafaring. The complexity of their roles, coupled with the provision of a high quality of services in global shipping, call for high quality accredited training and harmonisation of maritime health practices. The analysis of policy, using 2 policy models, showed that a window of opportunity appears to be in favour of a policy regarding the recognition of maritime medicine as a medical specialisation. International stakeholders, together with the International Maritime Health Association, should actively advocate such a perspective which will be in favour of seafarers, who will enjoy better health and wellbeing, with higher income while avoiding ill-health, as well as the shipping industry, which will employ satisfied and loyal employees, and will enjoy a higher reputation.
Illicit maritime activities generate significant scholarly and policy attention. While diverse in nature, governance responses share many regulatory features. This introduction advances the notion of maritime justice, a socio‐legal research agenda. Different from broader maritime security studies, it places law at the centre of the inquiry, studying maritime governance practices through the lens of regulation. Empirically, it covers operational, spatial, and structural junctions between illicit maritime activity and regulatory responses deriving from international and domestic law. Analytically, it is heterogeneous but holds a methodological commitment to studying everyday law enforcement practices of maritime security governance to disentangle its meanings and effects. The introduction posits the junction between illicit maritime activities and regulatory responses as a productive space to study the varied norms that shape order‐making at sea, and vice versa.
Strict limits on the maximum sulphur content in fuel used by ships have recently been imposed in some Emission Control Areas (ECAs). In order to comply with these regulations many ship operators will switch to more expensive low-sulphur fuel when sailing inside ECAs. Since they are concerned about minimizing their costs, it is likely that speed and routing decisions will change because of this. In this paper, we develop an optimization model to be applied by ship operators for determining sailing paths and speeds that minimize operating costs for a ship along a given sequence of ports. We perform a computational study on a number of realistic shipping routes in order to evaluate possible impacts on sailing paths and speeds, and hence fuel consumption and costs, from the ECA regulations. Moreover, the aim is to examine the implications for the society with regards to environmental effects. Comparisons of cases show that a likely effect of the regulations is that ship operators will often choose to sail longer distances to avoid sailing time within ECAs. Another effect is that they will sail at lower speeds within and higher speeds outside the ECAs in order to use less of the more expensive fuel. On some shipping routes, this might give a considerable increase in the total amount of fuel consumed and the CO2 emissions.
The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a specialized United Nations (UN) agency regulating maritime transport. One of the very hot topics currently on the IMO agenda is decarbonization. In that regard, the IMO decided in 2018 to achieve by 2050 a reduction of at least 50% in maritime green house gas (GHG) emissions vis-à-vis 2008 levels. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the possible role of Market Based Measures (MBMs) so as to achieve the above target. To that effect, a brief discussion of MBMs at the IMO and the EU is presented, and a possible way forward is proposed, focusing on a bunker levy.
An adaptive machine learning framework is established for an implicit determination of the performance degradation of a ship due to marine growth, i.e., biofouling. The framework is applied in a case study considering telemetry data of a cruise ship operating predominantly in the Caribbean Sea. The dataset encompasses seven years including three dry-docking intervals and several in-water cleaning events. The COVID-19 period receives special focus due to the drastic change in the operational profile. A main outcome of the study is a comparison of the derived performance estimate to the corresponding results of the industry standard ISO 19030. Additional aspects of the present study include the use of special regularization techniques for incremental machine learning and the increase of transparency through the implementation of prediction intervals indicating model uncertainty. Overall, it is found that the developed machine learning framework shows good agreement with the industry standard underlining its plausibility.
Aiming at reducing CO2 emissions from shipping at the EU level, a system for monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of CO2 emissions of ships was introduced in 2015 with the so-called ‘MRV Regulation’. Its stated objective was to produce accurate information on the CO2 emissions of large ships using EU ports and to incentivize energy efficiency improvements by making this information publicly available. On 1 July 2019, the European Commission published the relevant data for 10,880 ships that called at EU ports within 2018. This milestone marked the completion of the first annual cycle of the regulation’s implementation, enabling an early assessment of its effectiveness. To investigate the value of the published data, information was collected on all voyages performed within 2018 by a fleet of 1041 dry bulk carriers operated by a leading Danish shipping company. The MRV indicators were then recalculated on a global basis. The results indicate that the geographic coverage restrictions of the MRV Regulation introduce a significant bias, thus prohibiting their intended use. Nevertheless, the MRV Regulation has played a role in prompting the IMO to adopt its Data Collection System that monitors ship carbon emissions albeit on a global basis.
This article develops a micro-level theoretical perspective of business influence in international negotiations. By drawing on organizational institutional theory, the article proposes that site-specific institutionalized norms can structure the nature and extent of business power. The article illustrates the value of this perspective through an illustrative case study of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) through interviews and participant observation of on-site dynamics during negotiations on environmental shipping regulation. The article shows how, in the case of the IMO, specific institutionalized norms and beliefs structure private actors’ possible influence and their claims to authority. In particular, strongly held beliefs about the nature of political deliberation in the IMO both constrain and enable business interests, sometimes overriding the general structural power of the shipping industry. This research implies that future scholarship of business power and lobbying should be attentive to specific institutionalized ideas structuring business actors’ range of legitimate activities, in particular in international institutions where individual negotiation sites can develop idiosyncratic norms and beliefs about the legitimacy of private actor participation.