This Focus Report begins with a brief appraisal of the progress on the implementation of the Rio Agreements and subsequent relevant UN Conferences. Critical issues and priorities are seen to be of a theoretical as well as of an institutional nature.
Intellectual inertia appears to be blocking progress towards a genuinely new economic order.
The very nature of the oceans, however, which has forced the international community to think innovatively with regard to the legal order, will oblige it equally to think innovatively with regard to the socio-economic order. The remaining parts of this report deal with institutional requirements of sustainable development in the oceans. The design of such a system should fully utilize existing institutions and abstain from creating new bureaucracies and additional financial burdens. A system such as envisaged in this Report is already clearly in the making.