Abstract

Since the early 1970s, shared concerns about marine pollution and other threats to the Mediterranean have motivated cooperation between countries in the region. The evolution, over 40 years, of the Mediterranean Action Plan attests to a growing body of rules seeking to prevent and mitigate ecological degradation in the marine environment and coastal areas. However, basin-wide biogeographical and climatological processes shaping, and being shaped by, socio-economic development paths in the Mediterranean – notably urbanization and tourist-oriented economic growth – threaten to overwhelm the modest gains made by more coordinated environmental management. In governance terms, the contrast is between, on the one hand, the legally binding obligations imposed on participating Mediterranean countries by the Mediterranean Action Plan (Barcelona Convention) and the Paris Agreement (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and, on the other, the soft law norms imparted mainly by the European Union and the Union for the Mediterranean in a series of initiatives furthering Euro-Mediterranean cooperation over climate, environment and energy issues. While there are clear thematic overlaps between these institutional pathways, there has been no meaningful orchestration or clustering of Mediterranean environmental governance.