CERMES Technical Report
Abstract:
The Caribbean Large Marine Ecosystem and Adjacent Areas (CLME) Project aims to improve management of shared living marine resources (LMRs) within the Wider Caribbean Region (WCR). The Transboundary Diagnostic Analyses (TDAs) for the three fisheries ecosystems have identified weak governance as a root cause of the problems facing these social ecological systems. The CLME Project has a strong emphasis on assessing LMR governance systems and on proposing ways of strengthening them. The treatment of governance in the CLME Project is based on the LME Governance Framework developed during the PDF-B Phase. The CLME
The CLME Project was designed to begin the process of building the LME Governance Framework for the WCR through a series of targeted activities, pilot projects and case studies. The governance assessment aspect of these pilots and case studies has been approached through a common methodology. In the CLME Project the following broad and inclusive definition of governance has been adopted. “Governance is the whole of public as well as private interactions taken to solve societal problems and create societal opportunities. It includes the formulation and application of principles guiding those interactions and care for institutions that enable them.”
The CLME Project also includes the Regional Governance Framework (RGF) component that is aimed at analyzing the regional ocean governance situation in the WCR and proposing an RGF as a basis for the Strategic Action Programme (SAP) that is a major output of the Project. The RGF component of the CLME Project combines information drawn from the pilots and case studies with information from additional governance analyses at the level of the entire WCR and also with other studies conducted outside the CLME Project to develop a multi-scale, multilevel RGF. This report describes the work done and the RGF that has been proposed for the SAP.
The development of the RGF has evolved over the duration of the CLME Project, starting with the PDF-B, through interaction with relevant regional organisations. Therefore what is presented here is viewed as a consensus rather than a set of options among which the regional organizations and countries must now decide.
CERMES Technical Report No 60.