The oceans and seas cover 75% of our Earth’s surface and the marine environment is vital for human existence. The services that the oceans and seas provide us are manifold. The ocean and seas are used to transport goods (shipping), to feed us (fishing and aquaculture), to provide us with fossil fuel and renewable energy (gas and oil extraction, offshore windmill farms) and to let us recreate (swimming, surfing, sailing). All these activities have adverse effects on the marine environment in the form of discharges to the marine environment and disturbance and damage of marine ecosystems and habitats. There is thus a need to protect the marine environment from the increasing burden caused by human activities.

Questions that emerge when studying the very complex and challenging governance of the marine environment are: how should we protect the marine environment? What kind of governance arrangement are necessary to reduce the impact from human activities on the marine environment? Who should be involved: the state, the market, civil society? And should this be done on the global level, the regional level, the national level or the local level? And what kind of governance arrangements have been developed so far? How do they look like and how do they work? Are they effective and why? Who is involved? And how do these governance arrangements deal with the globalization of politics and economy? To what extent are these governance arrangements linked to each other? Do they overlap? Is there a need to integrate them? And how could that be achieved?