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Introduction

I have devoted the better part of my adult life to the oceans, not only because I have loved them since early childhood, not only because I have learned to understand a little better how crucially important they are for the conservation of the biosphere and biodiversity, for the survival of humanity on earth; for the enrichment of our cultures, including the arts; for the world economy; for the enhancement of national and international security, but I had, from the very beginning, the gut feeling that more was at stake than the oceans, great as they are. The fact is that in trying to build a new system of governance and management for the oceans and the coastal areas, we will be making, perforce, a major contribution to the building of a new national/international system or order for the next century. The world ocean has been, and is, so to speak, our great laboratory for the making of a new world order. For a combination of reasons it was in the oceans, and only there, that we could introduce a series of new concepts, principles and norms which eventually will have to be applied to the world as a whole.

While all these matter are closely interlinked and ought to be considered as a whole, I have chosen today to focus on the economic dimension and, within this perspective, on the development and the potential of one of the new institutions created by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the International Sea-bed Authority with its headquarters in Jamaica.

I am going to move from the more general to the more specific.

The first thing that strikes you when you work with the oceans is that they are a medium that is so different from the terrestrial medium within which we are used to work, that it forces you to think differently, to think anew. This applies to the conduct of marine scientific research, which has become increasingly interdisciplinary as well as international because geology, biology, meteorology, hydrology, chemistry and physics, social sciences and natural sciences all interact when we are dealing with the oceans; everything flows, and boundaries are more fiction than reality as political boundaries, economic boundaries, and ecological boundaries no longer coincide. It applies to the making of law and governance, as we discovered during the long years of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea; and it applies to economics: from whatever starting point we move into the oceans, we have to change our thinking towards the conceptions of very large, complex systems and interdisciplinary, comprehensive, and integrative approaches.