Four principles in marine environment protection: A comparative analysis

The protection of the marine environment is propelled in part by specific principles that yield normative prescriptions to guide conduct. Four of these—namely sustainable development, pollution prevention, precaution, and the polluter pays—are all ultimately characterized as principles. In that form they are, in terms of general juridical efficacy, prescriptively imprecise and capable of generating an interlocking array of more specific norms that may be applied to realize their common goal of keeping the seas clean. In comparison, their conceptual individualities coincide and reinforce each other as to normative content and implications, as well as the procedural prescriptions they could and do, interpretively, yield.