Director at Howell Marine Consulting / Visiting Professor of Practice at Newcastle University
Delivering in government
‘I spent seven years from 2009 to 2016 working alongside colleagues to create and deliver one of the most ambitious programmes for delivering coherent, integrated, marine management in the world. During this time, I was at the Marine Management Organisation in England, variously as Head of Strategic Development, Head of Marine Licensing and then as Chief Scientific Advisor. Our main challenge was to take the intent and aspiration set out by the UK Government in the UK Marine Policy Statement and deliver a system of management not only for our marine environment, but also for all those human activities that take place within it. It is, after all, a truism that we cannot really manage our environment, we can only manage activities taking place within it.
Since leaving the MMO, I have reflected on our achievements, and our failings, order to create a framework for delivering integrated marine management (IMM) that can be used in any governmental situation. I have also been reconnecting with some of my academic colleagues, and realised that I found it quite difficult to map my experiences within government onto many of the theoretical constructs of marine governance in the academic literature. I have a feeling that this is mainly because in government, you are focused on the political reality of delivery, which can be capricious at times, rather than sticking to a rigid decision making theory or philosophical approach. This often results in delivery mechanisms and decision making frameworks that may not be perfect from a theoretical point of view, but allow good, proportionate decision making to take place.
In developing a delivery framework for IMM, I have come to understand that personally I have a tendency to focus on good government, mainly in the belief that without good government, you cannot have good governance.’ Click here to read more
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