Practice, Assemblage And Emergence In The Governance Of Freight Shipping

With around 90% of global trade currently transported by ship (OECD 2021), maritime and shipping governance issues are of great significance in global affairs. International organizations, states and NGOs have asserted that significant governance gaps remain in maritime affairs, in respect of decarbonization, seafarers' rights, and pollution. According to some scholars, private actors have exercised a largely obstructive influence regarding many regulatory priorities in maritime governance in recent decades (Roe 2013).

In keeping with a longstanding 'seablindness' (Bueger, Edmunds 2017) in Political Science and International Relations, however, the understanding of the shipping industry's role in shaping the regulation and governance of the oceans remains limited. While there is some recognition that shipping actors, the lifeblood of the global supply chain, comprise the most important constituency of private authority in global maritime policy arenas, many questions about their involvement in maritime governance remain unanswered. How is the influence of shipping enacted across multiple levels of maritime governance? In what ways has the extent and practice of this influence changed over time? How, and in what ways, does the influence of shipping inhibit more effective maritime governance? Focusing on three sites of governance - the International Maritime Organization, European Union and UK Government - this project aims to answer such questions, providing the first comprehensive study of the governance practices of the shipping industry in maritime affairs.

This will be enabled by drawing on recent theoretical advances in International Relations. In line with broader trends in global governance, maritime policy processes have exhibited new forms of complexity in recent decades. Processes of contestation and decision-making are now increasingly enmeshed in (for example) conference receptions, scientific consultations, and collaborative research and development. To examine such forms of governance, however, advanced theoretical and methodological tools are required. Accordingly, this study draws on assemblage theory and international practice theory. The latter is a theoretical and methodological tradition that identifies practices as the foremost units for understanding social relations, and which has emerged in the last ten years to explore the full diversity of the processes through which power is enacted in global politics. Focusing in particular on practices through which actors build perceptions of competence and authority, the project will explore a wide range of practices enacted both within and adjacent to policy arenas in maritime governance, and trace these across the trajectory of ocean governance in the post-1948 period.

Overall, therefore, this project seeks to make contributions to two bodies of scholarship. Firstly, enabled by its conceptual focus on practice, the study will establish how private power functions in maritime affairs, seeking to theorize private authority in maritime rule-making; these questions remain largely overlooked in maritime governance and policy literature. Secondly, due to the distinctiveness of maritime affairs, the project promises to make important contributions to broader literatures on private power and emergence in transnational governance, examining forms of practice that have hitherto been afforded little attention in Political Science. Additionally, through the creation of an open knowledge network encompassing all of the project's research partners and contacts, it seeks to bring to a practitioner audience new understandings of the dynamics between the politics of shipping and existing regulatory gaps in maritime affairs. The project will adopt a mixed-methods approach, undertaking around one hundred semi-structured interviews on current and recent governance practices, along with participant observation and extensive archival research.