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Sustainable fisheries; Marine ecosystems; Transparency

Introduction

In recent years, there has been both a growing sense of alarm about the decline of marine ecosystems and an increasing awareness of the numerous benefits they provide. A reenergized global community that is determined to take action to ensure a better future for the oceans is one of the outcomes. Efforts to safeguard healthy oceans and sustainable fisheries are being aided by a multifaceted landscape of financial resources. This ‘coda’ sums up the key subjects rising up out of a studio in which lead creators of this extraordinary issue examined crosscutting issues desperately requiring further consideration with a gathering of policymakers and specialists. The discussions consistently led to the following three distinct categories of major interests and priorities: 1) the requirement for coherence, transparency, and enhanced monitoring of the effects of projects [1].

Due to a lack of transparency in funding allocations, many of the uncertainties surrounding project funding for marine conservation and fisheries are present. The lack of transparency makes it difficult to: 1) keep track of the amount of money given by various donors; (2) Classify projects as well as the associated funding streams, particularly to learn which aspects of “fisheries and oceans” are attracting funding. As a result, data collection and monitoring and evaluation of funding initiatives are hampered [2].

The Creditor Reporting System, which is run by the OECD and makes information about the commitments and disbursements of official development assistance from donor government’s public, may fall on one end of the transparency spectrum. Since its launch in 1995, the CRS has recorded nearly 100% of all ODA commitments. In addition, since 1997, a set of standard numerical “markers” have been used to categorize the policy goals of ODA commitments [3]. Five of these “markers” are specifically dedicated to the development of fisheries goals. This publicly accessible database is used for much of the analysis and comprehension of global trends in ODA commitments and disbursements, despite the fact that the strategic and geopolitical motivations of ODA commitments are not captured by this system and remain contentious.

However, in comparison to other sources of funding, ODA’s importance to ocean conservation and sustainable use has decreased. After years of rapid and consistent growth, one analysis found that philanthropic support for ocean-related issues exceeded ODA for the first time in 2015. In addition, a growing number of new and important donors, including China, have chosen not to report on ODA allocations through the OECD Creditor Reporting System because they believe that providing detailed information about funding allocations may not be beneficial. Disclosure of any information regarding funding allocations is entirely voluntary for both philanthropies and new and emerging donor nations, and it typically does not take place in a format that is compatible with the OECD Creditor Reporting System [4]. However, a number of initiatives have been launched with the intention of capturing a portion of these financial flows, which may make it easier to compare these flows to more conventional sources of financing. In general, there isn’t a common reporting system, which makes it hard to compare different funding streams, hides the nature of global funding, and makes it harder to know how aid actually affects development.

The difficulty of utilizing standard classifications to identify investments in fisheries is the second point. The idea of fisheries-related intercessions has changed extraordinarily over the beyond 3 forty years progressing from very fisheries-centered projects, to specifically more extensive mediations including issues of administration, social association, power relations, local area advancement and basic liberties. A change of this kind might be a natural response to the changing field of fisheries, which has moved away from using more traditional methods to manage resources and toward seeing the industry as part of complex social-ecological systems [5]. Therefore, the issue is not just about how fisheries interventions are packaged; rather, it is also about how they are conceived in light of context, globally acknowledged funding priorities, and shifts in donor perceptions of the allocations that should be targeted. Therefore, any given small-scale fisheries development project could be framed as a project for fisheries, livelihoods, food security, rural development, or even a project for gender or climate change adaptation. In order to increase the likelihood of securing funding, project developers are encouraged to creatively frame projects in accordance with donor agencies’ current institutional preferences [6]. By packaging and officially labelling projects according to other themes, some projects with a focus on fisheries become “hidden” fisheries projects. As a result, the amount of money flowing into the sector would be underestimated because such projects would not receive a code of purpose that is related to fisheries. In other instances, projects explicitly set out to achieve a variety of goals and take ecological and human well-being into account, making it difficult to comfortably classify them as interventions. As a result, tracking systems need to be sufficiently granular to record multiple co-benefits, which could come from multiple investments.

However, what difference does it make that such a scope of purposeful and inadvertent obscurity exists across the financing scene? First of all, the international community is tracking progress toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals that go along with the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda and has pledged to give priority to particular sectors, regions, and disadvantaged groups. For instance, Small Island Developing States and Least Developed Countries receive special attention in two of the SDG 14 targets, while small-scale fishers receive special attention in another [7]. It would be possible to accurately determine whether stated priorities align with allocation decisions with a more inclusive reporting system that includes philanthropy, official development assistance, and new and emerging donors. Through the International Aid Transparency Initiative, information on development projects and their outcomes may be made public. This could lead to increased accountability and transparency.

Giver and beneficiary states have long perceived the requirement for more noteworthy coordination and intelligence to augment the positive effect of restricted assets accommodated advancement intercessions. The Accra Agenda for Action and the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness represent ambitious global initiatives: to increase recipient nations’ ownership of their own development processes; to make sure that donors support these strategies and encourage more efficient partnerships for inclusive development; to support aid that has an impact that can be seen and measured; and for recipients and donors to share responsibility for achieving these objectives [8]. Recognizing that a lack of coordination can have adverse effects on both donors and recipients is at the heart of the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda. Despite efforts led by the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation and the endorsement of 137 donor and recipient nations, in addition to additional multilateral institutions and civil society organizations, progress toward achieving these objectives has been sluggish. This may, at least in part, be because the term “coherence” is hard to define and is linked to a lot of ambiguities and choices in the development field [9]. “One or more actors’ policies work in tandem, synergistically or at least not in open contradiction, to promote a common overarching objective,” is the meaning here.

There is cause for optimism in the field of ocean finance due to the possibility that philanthropy and Official Development Assistance are, perhaps unintentionally, complementing one another geographically. Even though there is some overlap, the majority of ocean-related philanthropy focuses on North America, while the majority of ODA focuses on Africa and Asia [10]. However, it appears that this pattern is changing, as a growing number of philanthropies seek to fund marine projects outside of North America. Care should be taken to ensure that interventions are complementary and adhere to the Paris Declaration and Accra Agenda’s goals in order to maximize their sustainability. There is less apparent coordination at the donorrecipient nexus. For instance, the focus of local policymakers and communities on sustainable livelihoods or food security may be out of sync with philanthropy’s heavy emphasis on promoting large notake marine protected areas (MPAs) rather than sustainable use MPAs. The qualification in accentuation may somewhat be a consequence of funders needing to be viewed as supporting preservation gauges as opposed to fisheries, which are many times seen as expanding tension on the marine climate [11]. Consequently, there might be a disincentive to subsidize fisheries projects and have them ordered in that capacity. In light of the rapidly shifting funding landscape, renewed efforts to ensure coherence and coordination across ocean finance types are especially important for maximizing aid effectiveness and transparency. The long-standing but frequently misunderstood “hard choices” that ocean and fisheries policy makes between frequently conflicting goals also impede coherence. Food security, biodiversity conservation, employment generation, and economic profitability are all common stated objectives for sustainable oceans; however, donor-supported interventions, particularly the larger ones, frequently address multiple of these simultaneously [12, 13]. However, actual project implementation may result in compromises between these objectives, raising the possibility that funding for healthy oceans may be so inconsistent as to have no effect on any of them at all. At least in the short term, targets under SDG 14.5, for instance, are probably subject to trade-offs with 14.b. Additionally, they may conflict with other highlevel goals, such as SDG 2. Accordingly, while cognizance ought to be sought after, it requires arrangement among funders on unambiguous means to resolve issues inside the sea and fisheries domain. However, this kind of agreement does not exist.

Conclusion

The interactions among workshop participants, who came from academia, policy, and practice, showed that everyone was aware of the complexity of ocean finance, but that the landscape is changing so quickly that everyone learned new and surprising things. It is still unclear how developments in the ocean finance community will affect the possibility of achieving ocean conservation and sustainable use in the long run. The geopolitical objectives behind funding, the complexity of ocean issues, and the existence of trade-offs between different objectives raise questions about whether increased funding can accelerate progress toward achieving the SDGs, despite the increasing focus on the oceans and the diversification of funding. An important foundation for determining whether changes in the funding landscape are resulting in outcomes that are more desirable is a better oversight, coordination, and evaluation of ODA resource allocations.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares has no conflict of interest.

Acknowledgement

None

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