| Abstract: | Anticipatory policy is premised on the need to respond to warnings about future threats and opportunities by positive political action. This paper discusses the notion of anticipatory policy by using three cases from ocean policy, deepwater ports, ocean thermal energy conversion, and deep seabed mining. Such policies tend to be extremely vulnerable to changes in the economic and political environments within which they operate. In order to understand how such policies succeed or fail requires that studies of policy implementation decades, not just several years. Although there has been a move in this direction in assessing social welfare policies, this approach has been far less evident in the natural resources area. |
