Introduction: governing oceans: what, why and how?

The oceans and their inability to be governed are major obstacles for national governments to be able to pursue their global ambitions (in terms of trade, economic development, climate change, and traditional and non-traditional security challenges). In a strange irony, considering over 70% of the globe is covered by oceans, they have been a consistent blind spot in discussions in international relations (see Bueger and Edmunds, 2017), whereas in other disciplines, oceans have received significant amount of attention (development, environment, international law for example). In this edited collection we explore how these different debates that span disciplines can be brought together into a cohesive whole. We focus on how policies related to oceans governance are developed, implemented and subsequently evaluated. Our central research question is what type of political space are the oceans and is it possible to create, implement and systematically evaluate an international framework to enable the oceans to be governed?