This "Process" will meet every year for one week to deal with the oceans. Until now, the General Assembly had only one day a year to deal with the oceans, and this was blatantly insufficient. This "Process" which is open to the participation of all members of the General Assembly, all the Agencies of the UN dealing with the oceans, and the "major groups" is another very important building block in the structure of ocean governance we see emerging
It has just completed its first session in New York: rather successfully, and is forwarding its report and recommendations to the General Assembly, which never before had such good material to base is decisions on.
Thus a system of ocean governance is taking shape that is consistent, coherent, participatory and bottom-up. The coastal community is best suited to deal with sustainable development improving livelihood. National government, in cooperation with local communities, must be the regulator and legislator; Fisheries management, enhancement of the marine sciences, technology development and transfer, monitoring surveillance and enforcement, integrating sustainable development with regional security - all this is best handled at the regional level, through he cooperation of States, regional institutions, and "major groups." Highly migratory stocks, global shipping, climate change, ozone depletion, inter-regional issues, and the coordination of the whole system, require global action at the level of the General Assembly
Borrowing from Gandhi, I like to call this emerging form of "ocean governance" "the Oceanic Circle." As it reaches from the individual to the local community to the nation to the region to the United Nations General Assembly. Gandhi described his idea on the global social order in a famous passage:(India of my Dreams):
In this structure, composed of innumerable villages,
there will be ever-widening, never ascending circles. Life will not be a pyramid
with the apex sustained by the bottom.
But it will be an oceanic circle
whose centre will be the individual,
always ready to perish for the village,
the latter ready to perish for the circle of villages,
till at last the whole becomes one life
composed of individuals,
