Maritime governance after COVID-19: how responses to market developments and environmental challenges lead towards degrowth

Abstract

This paper considers two current challenges in the governance of maritime transport, specifcally container shipping. The frst is the oligopolistic market structure of container shipping, the downsides of which became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. The second challenge is climate change, both the need to reduce emissions to zero by 2050 and to adapt to efects that are already locked in. The paper reviews the academic and policy literature and unveils a link between these market and environmental challenges which result from a focus on efciency without considering negative efects such as diseconomies of scale and induced trafc, leading to a continued rise in total industry carbon emissions. The review likewise identifes links in how policy-makers react to the two challenges. Regulators could remove anti-trust exemptions from carriers, and policy-makers are being pushed to provide strict decarbonisation targets with a coherent timeline for ending the use of fossil fuels. Recent thinking on ecological economics, degrowth and steady-state economics is introduced as the paradigm shift that could link these two policy evolutions.