Accountability and Systems of Self‐Governance: The Case of the Maritime Industry

Environmental policy has predominantly been informed by a command‐and‐control policies. There are reasons to believe that the benefits of command‐and‐control regulations are diminishing or increasingly difficult to measure, whereas the cost of their enforcement is rising. In this paper, I argue that these problems could be overcome if it is recognized that the state is but one source of individual and organizational accountability. I illustrate this argument by discussing the case of the international marine industry. I argue that the marine industry is but one instance of a wide variety of systems of self‐governance. In the final section, I outline an innovative approach to the management of environmental risks, and make suggestions for further investigations.