ABSTRACT
Strategies for leadership in marine environmental governance are examined. This chapter defines leadership in terms of multilevel activity directed towards building capacities to act. Leadership is central to marine environmental governance in identifying problems and building trust among actors that, without that leadership, might face difficulties in working collectively. Leadership, or the lack of it, can be exercised by individuals, such as national leaders, corporate executives, and activists, with roles in the regimes and institutions that formulate and implement marine environmental governance. Through their leadership, they can promote new rules and measures for action, build trust among the entities that must carry out action, and address fragmentation among those entities. The chapter explores several dimensions of leadership: structural leadership among states and international organisations, which is often premised on the distribution of material power; cognitive leadership, which is focused on how knowledge is created, distributed, and transformed, in the process affecting conceptual frameworks that guide or at least affect policies; and relational leadership, a dimension that highlights the important interactions among actors that are central to whether marine environmental governance will be effective.
