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States have increased the pace and scale of conservation efforts in recent years as they strive to meet ambitious terrestrial and marine protected area targets. The ecological gains made in this push for protections, however, seem to be no better than if governments designated protected areas at random. Many critics point to states prioritizing quantity over quality of protections—rightly so—but this point does not fully explain the shortcomings of the global biodiversity network. The problem is more deeply rooted in the processes through which governments designate protected areas. Governments prioritize minimizing short-term commercial losses over maximizing long-term ecological gains in conservation policy processes, leading to two predominant types of protected area: residual and paper park. The causal mechanism driving these processes is how salient industry interests are in an area targeted for protections, which predicts government policy response, demonstrated here through case studies in Australia and the United States.

A handful of companies dominate the world’s shipping industry. These firms have gained political leverage over the global governance of container shipping in particular. Intriguingly, in recent years the Danish conglomerate Maersk—the world’s biggest container and shipping vessel company since the mid-1990s—has been using its influence to push for higher environmental standards for the industry as a whole. To some extent these initiatives are helping to promote environmental efficiencies, cleaner fuels, and greener technology. But they are also raising costs for small and midsized companies with extremely low profit margins, further enhancing the competitiveness of the biggest shipping conglomerates in an increasingly oligopolistic market. While voluntary self-governance by companies such as Maersk is incrementally improving the environmental management of global shipping, it is also further concentrating governance power within a few transnational corporations, potentially taking more ambitious regulation off the agenda.

Conserving the Oceans: The Politics of Large Marine Protected Areas documents the efforts of activists and states to increase the pace and scale of global ocean protections, leading to a new global norm in ocean conservation of large marine protected areas (MPAs) exceeding 200,000 km2. Through an analysis of domestic political economies, the book explains how states have protected millions of square kilometers of ocean space while remaining highly responsive to the interests of businesses. It argues that states design environmental policies above all around two key features of a given space: (1) the composition of extractive versus non-extractive industry interests; and (2) the salience of various industry interests, defined as the degree to which businesses would suffer tangible and significant costs in response to new environmental regulations. Through an analysis of large MPA advocacy campaigns in Australia, Palau, and the US, this book demonstrates how the political economy of a given marine space shapes how governments align their environmental and economic goals, sometimes strengthening conservation but more often than not undermining it. While recognizing important global progress and growing ambition to conserve ocean ecosystems, Conserving the Oceans demonstrates that even ambitious large MPAs have so far not fundamentally challenged a neoliberal paradigm of environmentalism that has caused considerable ecological harm.

This concluding chapter examines the question of whether or not large marine protected areas (MPAs) are a desirable and effective solution to ongoing ocean decline. It makes two seemingly at odds arguments, which it attempts to reconcile. The first argument is that the norm of large MPAs does represent an important paradigm shift in marine conservation, one that has given unprecedented attention to ocean biodiversity loss globally. The second argument qualifies this paradigm shift, claiming that the large MPA norm is still consistent with a neoliberal paradigm of environmentalism that insists that environmental protection not undermine economic growth.

This chapter introduces the norm of large marine protected areas (MPAs). It defines the norm and poses the two questions that this book seeks to answer: (1) Why have large MPAs emerged as the solution of choice for governments. (2) What explains differences in how governments manage their large MPAs? It positions these questions within the norm diffusion literature in international relations and offers an alternative analytical approach to norm localization in international relations that foregrounds domestic political economies. The chapter then introduces the book’s process tracing methodology and details case selection and data collection.

This chapter examines the Palauan government’s creation of the 500,000 km2 Palau National Marine Sanctuary. Palau’s critical dependence on its ecotourism sector—54% of GDP in 2015—meant that business interests and conservation objectives were largely aligned in Palau. At the same time, profits from commercial fishing in Palau’s waters went primarily to foreign-based fleets. The legislation for the sanctuary not only protected biodiversity, but was an effort to restructure the country’s commercial fishing industry to better benefit Palauans. Whereas most prior large marine protected area campaigns had been initiated by environmental groups, this one was initiated by Palauan President Tommy Remengesau Jr. This chapter demonstrates that, given a favorable political economy, business influence can sometimes lead to better protections.

This chapter examines the fraught efforts of subsequent Australian governments to protect the Australian Coral Sea over a 10-year period. The political economy of the Australian Coral Sea made efforts to protect it a contested stakeholder battle between the government, environmental groups, the ecotourism sector, and the commercial and recreational fishing sectors. Moderate levels of commercial activity in the area forced the government to repeatedly water down regulations over its decade-long consultation process. The end result, this chapter argues, was a “paper park” that does little to protect ocean ecosystems. The Coral Sea process demonstrates the outsized influence that even relatively minor extractive industry interests can often have over conservation policy.

This chapter analyses the campaign to expand the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, which was first created by President George W. Bush in 2009 and then expanded by President Barack Obama in 2014 to 1,270,000 km2. It argues that the remoteness of the monument, and the minimal commercial activity occurring within it, provided environmental groups with considerable influence in lobbying for ambitious protections. The chapter goes on to explain that the commercial fishing industry was largely unsuccessful in its efforts to limit and scale back protections for the monument. Its inability to demonstrate high interest salience in the region weakened its bargaining position with the Obama White House, thereby paving the way for stricter conservation measures.

This chapter traces the initial emergence and spread of the norm of large marine protected areas (MPAs). It explains why the conditions were present for the emergence of large MPAs as the solution of choice for activists and governments looking to ramp up marine conservation efforts. Through the advocacy efforts of a few individuals and organizations, the large MPA norm began to take hold, one jurisdiction at a time, beginning with high-profile campaigns in Kiribati and the US. This chapter documents those initial successes, explaining how they created the conditions for the broader, global uptake of the large MPA norm.

This chapter introduces a strategic actor framework of environmental norm diffusion, which it uses to develop a theory of the diffusion of the norm of large marine protected areas. By incorporating domestic material interests into environmental norm diffusion, it builds norm diffusion theory to better explain why certain environmental norms gain global traction while others do not, as well as why there is considerable variation in how environmental norms are localized. The chapter also examines the interests of key stakeholder groups, including the state, extractive and non-extractive industry, environmental groups, and local communities. The framework foregrounds business influence to explain how governments attempt to reconcile new environmental norms with commercial interests. In some instances, business influence can lead to stronger protections, but more often tends to undermine conservation goals. This chapter analyses the potential and the limits of business influence over state conservation policy.

Since 2006, governments have designated or announced 18 marine protected areas (MPAs) larger than 200 000 km2. Before then there was only one: Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, established in 1975. To explain this marked shift in state governance of marine biodiversity, this article points to the importance of a gradual strengthening over the past decade of a global norm that large MPAs, especially no-take reserves, are valuable for meeting conservation objectives and targets. As is true for most global environmental norms, the large MPA norm emerged primarily out of civil society, especially from groups framing large MPAs as an effective way to help stop ocean decline. Importantly, however, the article demonstrates that the adoption of this norm is uneven across states, and implementation of large MPAs varies widely as governmental and non-governmental forces interact – sometimes clashing, sometimes cooperating – with fishing, tourism and resource industries. For evidence, this article draws on fieldwork and 74 interviews across five large MPA cases: Papahānaumokouākea (2006) and the Pacific Remote Islands in the US (2009); the Coral Sea in Australia (2012); the Palau National Marine Sanctuary (2015); and the UK's Pitcairn reserve (2015). A comparative analysis of these cases reveals the influence of non-governmental groups (especially The Pew Charitable Trusts and the National Geographic Society) on the gradual strengthening of the large MPA norm; the importance of the large MPA norm for the formation of marine policy; and the significance of domestic political economies for shaping variable norm adoption and state implementation. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment