Special Issue on Protecting the Ocean: The London Convention and Stockholm Declaration at Fifty – Introduction

The introduction to this special issue of nineteen short articles, a result of a conference hosted at the World Maritime University ( WMU ) in October 2022 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the adoption of the Stockholm Declaration and London Convention. The conference was co-organised by the WMU -Sasakawa Global Ocean Institute and the International Maritime Organization ( IMO ) under the title ‘Protecting the Ocean – Moving Forward at 50: London Convention and Stockholm Declaration’. The articles in this special issue contextualise these instruments and practice across international environmental law, the law of the sea, and maritime law that descends from them (Part 1); interrogate their allocation of liability and responsibility for protecting the marine environment (Part 2); consider their incorporation of plural sources of knowledge (Part 3); and highlight their instantiation of, and potential to change, relations of international political economy (Part 4).