Tiffany H. Morrison

Abandoned, Lost, or otherwise Discarded Fishing Gear (ALDFG) contributes to marine plastic pollution, negatively impacting marine habitats and wildlife, and posing risks to human activities (e.g. tourism, maritime transport). To date, research has primarily focused on understanding and classifying types of ALDFG; investigating its impacts on the marine environment; or exploring potential management approaches to address it. Few studies focus on the complex governance of ALDFG, more particularly how power shapes actors’ interactions and collaborations across governance levels (e.g. regional and EU) and sectors (e.g. fisheries and waste management) to mitigate ALDFG. Through case analysis of ALDFG in the Baltic Sea as a Collaborative Governance Regime (CGR), we identify several governance challenges resulting from the interface between power and collaboration. First, multi-level governance causes power asymmetries that hinder capacity for joint action amongst actors at the regional level. Second, policy gaps create power vacuums that limit principled engagement from key actors. Finally, shared discourses lead to powerful regional narratives that weaken shared motivation and capacity for joint action between actors to address common challenges. By synthesizing theories of collaborative governance with power and testing this synthesis in the Baltic Sea region, we address both a gap in the literature on CGRs and identify opportunities that improve governance to mitigate ALDFG.

Marine systems are rapidly changing in response to global heating. The scale and intensity of change are triggering a host of novel interventions to sustain oceans and ocean-dependent societies. However, the pace of new interventions is outstripping capacity to prevent unintended consequences because governance systems to ensure responsible transformation of marine systems are not yet in place. Responsible transformation entails transitioning marine systems to sustainable, equitable, and adaptive states through weighing intervention risks against benefits, resolving ethical liabilities, improving social cobenefits, establishing legitimacy, and managing climate policy integrity. Global, national, and local actors must urgently convert responsible transformation principles into rules—and practice—to ensure that novel marine-climate interventions are safe, equitable, and effective.

Climate change impacts on the social–ecological conditions that communities depend on may increase the vulnerabilities to new conflicts. Yet, the communities that will be most impacted by climate change, as noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are already conflict‐affected communities. Here, we present the results of a systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies (n = 212) in Spanish and English on the climate–conflict relationship. We found that most studies are focused on a direct relationship between climate change and violent conflict, and there has been less attention on a contextual or indirect relationship in already conflict‐affected communities. Studies on this contextual or indirect relationship suggest a climate change–conflict cycle that is negatively reinforcing, whereby violent conflict increases climate change vulnerability and feedback from climate change increases violent conflict vulnerability. While limited in number, such studies provide important insights enabling further conceptual development and empirical examination of how climate impacts interact with violent conflict, and how governance efforts can simultaneously support peacebuilding and climate change adaptation. Drawing this work together with the latest frameworks in conflict studies and adaptation, we sketch out a promising synthetic agenda, focusing on how to design policies and projects that build synergistic capacities and address cumulative and interactive impacts of climate change and violent conflict. Without such insight, efforts to treat climate and conflict in parallel may be ineffective or even counterproductive, worsening violent conflict and, in turn, further reducing the capacities of communities to build peace and resilience.