The Future of Ocean Governance and Capacity Development

Born in 1918 as World War i was receding, Elisabeth Mann Borgese learned to make her own way in a man's world as an independent, self-taught author, professor, and oceans activist.Elisabeth possessed an unwavering commitment to improving ocean governance so that all countries could benefit from exploiting and conserving the wealth of the world's marine resources.Her practical and conceptual work contained the seeds of many ocean governance developments addressed in this volume, whether training marine management experts or conceiving institutions for strengthening international ocean cooperation.The concept of treating ocean resources as common heritage, for example, was new and untested when she first expanded upon it in the 1960s and 1970s, as preparations for what would become the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea took shape.Almost half a century later the concept still challenges the slow-moving institutions of international law, which eventually acknowledged that seabed and subsoil resources beyond national jurisdiction are common heritage, but wrestles still with expanding that protection to living marine resources.Elisabeth's commitment to international solutions to persistent problems were the product of a life lived across continents and countries, and across eight decades.She witnessed the naïve belief of her parents' generation in the power of international institutions and its slow transformation into a more practical understanding that national and international interests are better pursued through regional and topical approaches to managing common resources.Elisabeth charted her own course in many arenas, each shaping her work on nationality, internationality, and ocean governance.As a German-European transplant to North America, she claimed four different national affiliations in her 83 years: German, Czechoslovak, American, and Canadian.Leaving Hitler's Germany for Switzerland in 1933 with her family at age 15, five years later they moved again, to Princeton, New Jersey.There her family's circle included fellow exiles Albert Einstein and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, whom she later married.Moving with him in the wake of World War ii to the University of Chicago, Elisabeth became secretary to the all-male Committee to Frame a World Constitution.Establishing her own credentials as a scholar of comparative constitutions she worked with another German émigré, Max Rheinstein, who founded the discipline of comparative law in the United States.Returning with her husband to Italy in the early 1950s, she soon found herself a young widow with two small daughters.xviii Foreword Making ends meet by teaching German, editing Ford Foundation journals, and writing reviews, she published her first novel, The Ascent of Woman, in 1963.She returned to the United States to become the sole female fellow at the Ford Foundation Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara (1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978), where she pursued her own research on comparative constitutionalism and ocean governance.Her first four decades of life are emblematic of an entire class of young women displaced by World War ii, each of whom made their way in foreign lands as wives, daughters, or on their own.Elisabeth's last move to a new country came in 1978 when she joined Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada.As a political science professor, she built on her work in community decision-making, constitutional processes, and common heritage until her death in 2002.Key to founding the International Ocean Institute was what colleagues recognized as one of her "most significant accomplishments [:] bridging the gap between the Euro-American elites amongst whom she was raised and the emerging elites of the Third World.This is a highly personal accomplishment, based on the respect and trust of both sides."1Elisabeth earned that trust and respect as a woman making her way in a male-dominated intellectual world, as a university professor with no formal academic training, and as a woman without a country advocating for countries without a voice to ensure fair access to marine resources.In these myriad roles, Elisabeth pointed us toward "The Future of Ocean Governance and Capacity Development" by engaging in both of those activities in concrete ways.The essays in this volume pay tribute to her pursuit of collaborative and practical solutions to better use of the world's oceans.

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