New PhD at NCLOS!

We congratulate Kristine Elfrida Dalaker who successfully defended her thesis on 6th of April.

Three people posing together for the camera and smiling.
From the left; dean Tore Henriksen, Kristine Elfrida Dalaker, PhD, and Professor Ingvild U. Jakobsen, leader of the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea. Foto: UiT.
The title of her dissertation is “Robust Institutional Arrangements for the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction”. She was given the subject “The Role of the United Nations in the Development of the Law of the Sea” for her trial lecture.

The assessment commitee was comprised of first opponent Professor James Harrison, Edinburgh Law School, second opponent Professor Elisa Morgera, University of Strathclyde, and finally Professor Irene Vanja Dahl, Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea. The disputation was led by professor Tore Henriksen, dean at the UiT – Faculty of Law.

Short popular scientific summary of the thesis:

This dissertation investigates the robust institutional arrangements that will be needed to implement the treaty that is being negotiated under the auspices of the United Nations for an international legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) for the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). If the negotiations are to conclude with a treaty that can meet its objective of ensuring the long-term conservation and sustainable use of BBNJ, the treaty must be built on an institutional foundation and architecture that is sufficiently robust to ensure its successful implementation.

This author has selected Elinor Ostrom’s theoretical framework of polycentric governance as the relevant framework to examine how to build robust institutional arrangements for the BBNJ treaty. Ostrom identified the best practices of institutional arrangements that had achieved sustainable outcomes for common-pool resources in developing her theoretical framework for polycentric governance. Ostrom presented the institutions’ best practices, or ‘design principles’, as those factors that contribute to the robustness of institutional arrangements.

Given that Ostrom’s framework is a study in robustness, it provides the means for this dissertation to answer the research question posed by this study regarding the robust institutional arrangements that will be needed for the implementation of the BBNJ treaty. Focus is given in the analysis to Ostrom's eighth design principle for nested enterprises and the requirements for adaptive governance using a law of the sea example of nested governance. The research question is answered by analyzing the three articles that comprise this article-based dissertation. The analysis renders recommendations for the building of robust institutional arrangements for the BBNJ treaty that would provide the legal authority for the implementation and operationalization of the treaty.



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created: 06.04.2022 15:27