ABSTRACT
The concept of “governance,” distinguished from “government,” envisages a broad array of legitimate inputs into public policy making under the changing conditions of contemporary society.1 At the international level, the governance concept is the latest intellectual response to the “anarchic” state of world society,2 and reflects a general awareness of the inadequacy of government systems and intergovernmental organizations to deal with complex problems. The broadened governance view of legitimacy, embracing economic and societal as well as political values, coincides with a new determination to achieve a higher degree of effectiveness in the highly complex field of ocean management. The need for a higher degree of sophistication in “ocean governance” opens up challenging opportunities for cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral interaction, whether or not one espouses the vision of “comprehensive ocean management,”3 or subscribes to the educational goal of “consilience.”4
