What have we learned from 30 years of environmental governance in the Baltic Sea?
The Baltic Sea is one of the busiest and most heavily governed seas in the world. Nine countries surround the sea, with the European Union adding another layer of regional governance. There is HELCOM, national governments and authorities, EU legislation and directives, marine spatial planning, environmental regulation, ecosystem-based management, regional strategies, national plans and countless projects bringing together researchers, policymakers and stakeholders.
In many ways, the Baltic Sea is held up as an example of what transboundary marine governance can look like. Countries sharing a marine ecosystem have built institutions and processes for working together despite having different interests, priorities and political systems.
But there is an obvious question that sits behind all of this: does all this governance actually work?
This was the starting point for my latest paper, published in Marine Policy. Rather than looking at one particular institution, policy or environmental problem, I wanted to take a step back and look across three decades of research literature to understand how environmental governance in the Baltic Sea has evolved, how it is understood, and what we actually know about its effectiveness.
To do that, I conducted a systematic literature review of 91 peer-reviewed articles published between 1998 and 2026.
What I found was a governance system that is sophisticated, multi-level and highly institutionalised—but one that continues to struggle with persistent problems.
A sea governed at many levels
The Baltic Sea and its environmental issues do not fit neatly within national borders. Nutrients released in one country can affect ecosystems elsewhere. Fish cross national boundaries. Shipping connects the entire region (and the rest of the world). New activities such as offshore wind are creating additional demands for marine space, and often competing with other marine sectors.
Environmental governance therefore has to operate across multiple levels. At the regional level, HELCOM provides an important forum for cooperation between the Baltic Sea countries. At the European level, EU directives and policies shape environmental protection, marine spatial planning, fisheries and energy infrastructure development. National governments then translate these commitments into national legislation, policies and decisions. Below that, implementation takes place through regional and local authorities, individual projects and other actors.
Governance in the Baltic Sea is often presented as a model of transboundary cooperation and has seen positive trends in reducing environmental issues, such as nutrient reduction and the return of top predators.
However, it also creates a fundamental challenge: the more levels of governance we have, the more opportunities there are for things to become fragmented.
A regional strategy can sound highly ambitious but each nation state can interpret it differently. A sectoral authority may have its own objectives and a local decision may have to balance yet another set of interests from various stakeholder groups.
Governance does not simply involve deciding what should happen. It also involves making sure that decisions made in different places, at different levels and for different purposes actually fit together.
The implementation gap
Perhaps the most important theme running through the literature is the gap between regional ambition and national implementation.
The Baltic Sea has no shortage of ambitious goals in environmental protection, infrastructure development and sustainable blue economic growth. The problem is that agreeing on a goal at the regional level does not automatically mean that it will be implemented consistently across all Baltic Sea countries.
This is particularly important because the concrete environmental decisions ultimately happen at the national level.
Regional cooperation can establish shared objectives, produce recommendations and develop common approaches. However, governments still have their own institutions, legislation, political priorities and economic interests. What looks coherent at the regional level can therefore become considerably more complicated once it reaches national implementation.
This is not necessarily a failure of cooperation and some degree of variation is inevitable in a region as culturally, politically and institutionally diverse as the Baltic Sea. However, it does mean that we need to pay much more attention to what happens between the regional agreement and the environmental outcome.
More institutions do not necessarily mean less fragmentation
Another recurring issue in the literature is fragmentation.
Environmental governance involves different sectors, institutions, jurisdictions and types of knowledge. Fisheries policy has different objectives from energy policy. Nature conservation has different regulatory structures from maritime transport. National governments have different responsibilities from regional organisations.
Further, the Baltic Sea does not suffer from one single environmental problem. There are overlapping, interlinked and causal interactions that make governance complicated.
Eutrophication, biodiversity loss, fisheries, pollution, climate change, offshore energy and increasing competition for marine space all interact. Trying to govern each issue separately can create conflicts between policies that were developed independently.
This is one reason why ecosystem-based management has become such an influential idea. In principle, it encourages us to look at the marine ecosystem as a whole rather than treating individual sectors or environmental problems in isolation.
But another finding from the review is that EBM is easier to embrace as a principle than to operationalise in practice.
It is relatively straightforward to say that decisions should consider the ecosystem as a whole. It is much harder to redesign institutions, legislation and decision-making processes so that they actually do this. The natural and human world are interlinked and intertwined in complex and often surprising ways.
Are we measuring whether governance works?
Perhaps the most surprising finding for me was not what the literature studies, but what it often does not study.
We know a great deal about governance arrangements, including institutions, networks, planning processes, stakeholder participation, policy instruments and different approaches to coordination. However, there is considerably less research asking a much more difficult question: what difference does all of this governance actually make to the environment?
The literature often discusses effectiveness in terms of institutional coordination, implementation or policy coherence. These are important dimensions of governance effectiveness but, ultimately, environmental governance exists to improve environmental conditions.
That means we should be asking whether governance contributes to cleaner water, healthier ecosystems, more sustainable fisheries, improved biodiversity or other tangible environmental outcomes.
However, this is difficult to measure. Environmental change is influenced by many factors, often over long periods of time with many causal interactions. It is not easy to attribute an improvement, or deterioration, to one particular governance arrangement.
The difficulty of measuring something should not mean that we stop trying. Otherwise, there is a danger that we end up evaluating governance by looking at whether governance exists.
We have a strategy, therefore we have governance.
We have a planning process, therefore we have governance.
We have stakeholder meetings, therefore we have participation.
We have an ecosystem-based management framework, therefore we are managing ecosystems.
These are not necessarily the same thing as achieving environmental improvements.
What about people?
The relatively limited integration of the social dimensions of sustainability is another dimension that stood out from the review.
Environmental governance is often discussed in terms of institutions, ecosystems, policies and instruments, but governance is ultimately about people.
Who gets to participate?
Whose knowledge counts?
Who benefits from environmental decisions?
Who bears the costs?
Which uses of the sea are prioritised when there is not enough space for everything?
These questions are becoming increasingly important as the Baltic Sea enters a period of rapid change.
Offshore wind is a particularly good example - increasing renewable energy production may be essential for the energy transition, but new offshore wind farms also create concerns about biodiversity, fisheries, shipping, landscapes and other uses of marine space.
There is no purely ecological answer to these questions. They are questions of governance.
Governance is not only about finding the technically optimal solution - it is also about negotiating between different interests, values and visions for the future.
So, is Baltic Sea governance failing?
After spending a considerable amount of time reading 91 papers about Baltic Sea governance, I would not describe the overall picture as one of failure. In fact, quite the opposite. There have been many positive developments in environmental conditions and ecosystems in the Baltic Sea.
Further, the Baltic Sea has developed an impressive governance architecture, and the region has demonstrated that countries can cooperate around a shared and highly complex marine ecosystem.
The problem is that institutional sophistication does not automatically translate into environmental effectiveness.
The same challenges appear again and again: fragmented institutions, gaps between regional commitments and national implementation, limited policy coherence, uneven implementation of ecosystem-based management and insufficient attention to social dimensions.
This suggests that the next stage of Baltic Sea governance should not simply be about creating more institutions, more strategies or more plans.
Instead, we need to understand better how governance works in practice.
What happens when regional objectives meet national institutions?
Why are some policies implemented more effectively than others?
How do different sectors interact when they compete for the same marine space?
How can ecosystem-based management move from a guiding principle to something that genuinely shapes decisions?
How can we tell whether governance is actually improving the state of the Baltic Sea?
From paper to practice
For me, the main message from this review is that we need to become better at understanding what makes governance effective.
That means looking beyond formal institutions and asking what happens during implementation. It means paying more attention to national and sub-national processes, rather than focusing predominantly on the regional level. It means examining policy innovation rather than assuming that existing instruments will be sufficient for emerging challenges.
It means taking the social dimensions of sustainability more seriously.
The Baltic Sea is going to face some difficult choices in the coming decades. We will need to protect and restore marine ecosystems while also accommodating new energy infrastructure, economic activities and changing patterns of marine use.
There will be conflicts. There will be trade-offs. There will be no single institution capable of resolving them all.
The answer is therefore unlikely to be a perfect governance system.
Instead, perhaps the real challenge is to develop a governance system that can learn, adapt and coordinate across boundaries while remaining connected to the people and ecosystems it is supposed to serve.
The Baltic Sea already has a remarkable amount of governance across multiple levels involving many actors and stakeholders.
The question now is how we make that governance work better for marine ecosystems and for us.
