ABSTRACT
More than 60% of the world’s ocean is beyond national jurisdiction. Governance of that portion of the ocean is necessarily global, as introduced in Chapter 2 and developed in more detail in this book. Moreover, for many reasons-some primarily political and some simply pragmatic-choices by governments for the policies they set and the management options that they choose are strongly influenced by governance decisions made at the global scale (Ridgeway 2014). Hence, the interactions of science processes and scientific information with policy-making at the global scale have implications not just at the global scale but also at regional, national, and subnational scales. In this chapter, I will explore how those interactions play out in the real world, primarily at the global scale, drawing from the scientific literature, reports of intergovernmental agencies, and personal experience.
