Browsing by Subject "High seas"

To address growing concerns about global oceans health, state and non-state actors have pushed for the establishment of large marine protected areas (LMPAs) in national exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and on the high seas. This push has resulted in a rapid proliferation of LPMAs in recent years, despite limited understanding of their social and political attributes and implications. This dissertation contributes to growing social science scholarship on LMPAs by employing a qualitative, multi-sited case study investigating negotiations over two proposed, overlapping LMPAs in Bermuda’s EEZ and the Sargasso Sea. It engages with human geography theory on territoriality to examine the territorial practices emerging through LMPA proposals and how negotiations over these ‘scaled-up’ management tools are contributing to transformations in global oceans governance. Specifically, it addresses three research questions: (1) What territorial practices do actors use in negotiations over LMPAs? (2) How do these territorial practices produce ocean space? (3) What do these territorial practices reveal about these ocean spaces and human-ocean relations?

To answer these questions, this dissertation traces negotiations over these two proposed LMPAs across space, actors, jurisdictional scale, and time, to study sites including Bermuda, Washington, DC, London, and the 2014 World Parks Congress in Sydney, Australia. Results demonstrate that actors used diverse territorial practices, such as map-making and the promotion of territorial narratives, to negotiate for particular governance outcomes. Some of these territorial practices served to ‘fix’ ocean spaces, belying their continuously emergent material and social realities. Others contributed to altering ocean space despite the absence of any formal regulatory change. Further, analysis revealed that the territorial practices employed during these two distinct, but related LMPA negotiations interacted, producing an unexpected territorial outcome in the Sargasso Sea.

Overall, this dissertation contributes to increasing scholarship in human geography on the emerging territorial processes transforming global oceans governance and, more broadly, human relations with offshore ocean spaces. It presents an empirical study that advances understanding of LMPA negotiations and reveals more diverse interests in and relations to these offshore spaces than traditional conceptualizations suggest. Results from this dissertation could inform ongoing and future LMPA proposals and negotiations through attention to the limits/possibilities produced and revealed by actors’ territorial practices.

Open‐ocean fisheries expanded rapidly from the 1960s and currently represent the largest direct stressor on high seas biodiversity and ecosystems. Open-ocean ecological research and the implementation of management actions to mitigate the impacts of fisheries has lagged behind those of coastal and deep-sea environments. I investigate opportunities to enhance a wholistic ecosystem-based approach to high seas fisheries management by: reviewing our understanding of the impacts fisheries across ecological scales, evaluating the gaps and opportunities in the mandates of existing and future governance frameworks and developing methodologies for creating dynamic spatiotemporal management tools to reduce bycatch. Results demonstrate that fisheries are impacting the open-ocean across ecological scales. Results also show that the population trajectories of most non-target species in the high seas are not being monitored by fishing nations, nor relevant fisheries management organizations. A new implementing agreement under the UN to sustainably manage high seas biodiversity could complement the mandates fisheries bodies. There is an opportunity for new technologies and modeling approaches to contribute to the implementation of an ecosystem-based approach to management by generating knowledge on the spatial ecology commercial fisheries and high seas biodiversity. My results show that the distribution of target and non-target species, as well as longline fishing activities are correlated with environmental conditions and that these can be predicted across spatial and temporal scales to inform spatial management of high seas pelagic fishing activities. Implementing an ecosystem-based approach will require embracing a precautionary approach to reduce the bycatch of non-target species, which can be accomplished through spatiotemporal avoidance and improving our monitoring of fisheries impacts across ecological scales.