碩士 / 國立臺灣大學 / 政治學研究所 / 106 / Since the 1960s, the international community has increasingly attached importance to issues related to the global environment, and countries have begun to pay attention to the possible pollution caused by various activities or accidents, such as land-based discharge, oil spills from vessels at sea, and spills from oil exploitation on the seabed, as well as events of biodiversity damage. In response to the requirements and appeals of many international conventions and declarations related to the oceans and the environment, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has incorporated policy objectives, cooperation mechanisms and principles for the prevention and control of marine pollution, the protection and conservation of the environment and biodiversity, and the establishment of marine management mechanisms into the international regime of the regional seas programme (RSP). Thus, understanding the development and evolution of the RSP could, on the one hand, longitudinally explore the development of marine environmental protection issues on which the international community has placed its emphasis on a time axis; while, on the other hand, could also horizontally explore on the regional level what kind of policy tools each regional sea is using to achieve the goals of marine environmental protection.
To this end, through a longitudinal study, this thesis explores what the major issues were on the global level that the UNEP RSP had concerned with throughout its development. And, through a horizontal comparison, this thesis explores what the important issues were that each individual regional sea area had concerned with. It is followed by, from the perspective of policy tools, an exploration on the types of policy tools that were developed in various regions in response to major ocean governance issues. This thesis goes further by comparing the policy tools adopted by the representative Mediterranean Sea area and the Wider Caribbean Sea area to observe their common and respective development of policy tools based on regional characteristics.
This thesis finds that on the global level there are three major subject matters in the marine environmental protection issue, namely, marine pollution, land-based marine pollution, and the protection and conservation of biodiversity with the ecosystem approach. The developmental trend of the marine environment issues that the RSP, as a regional-level marine environmental governance mechanism, intends to deal with is basically the same as that of the UNEP on the global level.
On the aspect of the policy tools employed by the various sea areas, this thesis pored over 11 out of the 18 sea areas that had developed their regional conventions and protocols. After a comprehensive consideration, the policy tools were divided into four categories, namely, “Domestic Authoritative Policy Tools,” “International Cooperative Policy Tools,” “Information Policy Tools,” and “Liability and Compensation Policy Tools.” By linking them to the three major subject matters of the marine environment protection, it is found that the use of all four major types of policy tools in all sea areas has increased significantly in terms of marine pollution issues, suggesting that the development of the four major types of policy tools in marine pollution issues is becoming maturer. In terms of biodiversity issues, domestic authoritative policy tools and information policy tools show some positive linear developmental trends while little development on the international cooperation policy tools and liability and compensation policy tools. On the issue of land-based ocean pollution, other than the liability and compensation policy tools the other three types of policy tools show a positive linear developmental trend.
Finally, by comparing the Mediterranean Sea and the Greater Caribbean Sea, it is found that, under the biodiversity issue, the main policy measures of these two sea areas are the establishment of special protected areas and the protection of wildlife; however, according to their respective characteristics, the Wider Caribbean Sea area focuses more on the development and utilization of marine resources than the Mediterranean Sea area does, while the Mediterranean Sea concerns more with the implementation of “common but differentiated responsibilities” principle among its Contracting Parties.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TW/106NTU05227048 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Fong-Wei Kyti Hu, 胡方維 |
| Contributors | 蔡季廷 |
| Source Sets | National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations in Taiwan |
| Language | zh-TW |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | 學位論文 ; thesis |
| Format | 248 |
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