Accountability and Systems of Self-Governance: The Case of the Maritime Industry

Environmental policy has predominantly been informed by a command-and-control policies. There are reasons to believe that the benefits of command-and-control regulations are diminishing or increasingly difficult to measure, whereas the cost of their enforcement is rising. In this paper, I argue that these problems could be overcome if it is recognized that the state is but one source of individual and organizational accountability. I illustrate this argument by discussing the case of the international marine industry. I argue that the marine industry is but one instance of a wide variety of systems of self-governance. In the final section, I outline an innovative approach to the management of environmental risks, and make suggestions for further investigations.