The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) remains the cornerstone of global ocean governance. However, it lacks effective provisions or mechanisms to ensure that all ocean space and related problems are dealt with holistically. With seemingly no opportunity for revision due to the Conventions burdensome amendment provisions, complementary mechanisms dealing with such aspects of global ocean governance including maritime transport, fisheries, and marine environmental sustainability, have been developed under the aegis of the United Nations and other relevant international organizations. This approach is inherently fragmented and unable to achieve sustainable global ocean governance. In light of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly Goal 14, the IMLI Treatise proposes a new paradigm on the basis of integrated and cross-sectoral approach in order to realise a more effective and sustainable governance regime for the oceans.

This volume focuses on the role of the UN Specialized Agencies towards the development of effective and sustainable ocean governance by looking at the more elaborate mechanisms they developed in order to achieve the desired objectives laid down in UNCLOS. From FAO to UNODC, the volume examines how they ensure sustainable development and how much coordination exists among them.

David Joseph Attard, the General Academic Coordinator and Editor of this series, is the Director of the International Maritime Law Institute. He has been a judge at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea since 2011, and Vice-President of the Tribunal since 2017. He read law at the University of Malta and the University of Oxford, was appointed to the Chair of Public International Law at the University of Malta, and has been a Visiting Professor of International Law at the University of Rome II, a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, as well as a Fullbright Fellow at the Yale Law School.
Malgosia Fitzmaurice, the Academic Coordinator of this volume, holds a Chair of Public International Law in the Department of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She specializes in international environmental law, the law of treaties, and indigenous peoples. She is Editor in Chief of the International Community Law Review journal and of the book series published by Brill/Nijhoff entitled Queen Mary Studies in International Law. Professor Fitzmaurice was invited as a Visiting Professor to and lectured at various universities, such as Berkeley Law School, the University of Kobe, and at Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris I), and she was involved in a multi stakeholder project funded by the EU Commission on environmental crime.
Alexandros X.M. Ntovas, the Editor of this volume, is a Lecturer in Shipping Law at Queen Mary's Centre for Commercial Law Studies. He has held a law lectureship in international law at the University of Southampton Law School, where he was also a Governing Board Member of the Institute of Maritime Law. He has studied under a number of prestigious scholarships for law and political sciences in Greece, England, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. He has practiced public and administrative law, and acted on numerous occasions as a policy advisor to governments, including the European Union, the public sector, and the shipping industry. His expertise lies in admiralty, with a focus on wet shipping law, navigational freedoms, and practice, as well as in all issues regarding piracy and other aspects of contemporary safety and security of ships, ports, and offshore installations. He leads the LLM in International Shipping Law.