The Role of OSPAR and Institutional Interlinkages in Achieving Sustainable Oceans

In order to minimize human pressures on the ecosystem ocean and pursue a cross-sectoral approach the European Commission introduced the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) in 2008, which aims at achieving Good Environmental Status in all European marine waters by 2020. For achieving this aim it is necessary to build on already existing institutions in the field by strengthening their interplay and institutional interaction. Especially the Regional Sea Conventions play a major role, when it comes to achieving coherence among different approaches, as well as integrating non-EU member states. OSPAR, the Regional Sea Convention for the North-East Atlantic is such an example with being an intergovernmental organizations (IGO) using different instruments than the EU (soft law compared to hard law), and having important non-EU countries such as Norway or Iceland as contracting parties. In 2010 OSPAR majorly changed its institutional design and also partly its thematic focus towards a better integration of the European MSFD into its work. This paper uses the approach of polycentricism to frame the different decision-making areas in the European marine policy field and thereby will specifically focus on the institutional interactions between OSPAR and the European Commission. It aims at unravelling how the institutional design of OSPAR sets up the complex relationship with the EU and vice versa, how the interplay has developed due to the institutional change of OSPAR and whether it actually supports cooperation among those two organizations and more importantly among the member states of both organizations or rather leads to institutional ambiguity and confusion and thus somewhat hinders the process of coherently implementing the MSFD. Furthermore the paper aims to shed light on the main drivers of OSPAR’s reorganization by applying different institutional change theories. It will do so by gathering qualitative and quantitative data through semi-structured interviews and secondary sources.