Institutional barriers constraining marine governance: A diagnostic approach

A growing body of literature has documented institutional barriers that constrain marine governance. However, research on institutional barriers is characterised by theoretical, conceptual and disciplinary fragmentation. This impairs case specific analysis and the development of cumulative insights. To address this challenge, we present a diagnostic approach to diagnose institutional barriers in marine governance. The approach takes a starting point in an earlier taxonomy of “institutional attributes”, which represent different but not distinct functional aspects of institutions. Indicators of institutional dysfunction were defined for each attribute, and the list of indicators was subsequently grounded and extended through a systematic scoping review. The scoping review followed PRISMA guidelines and encompassed peer-reviewed articles reporting on institutional barriers in a marine policy context. Institutional problems were often associated with indicators of dysfunction within multiple institutional attributes, with indicators reflecting different aspects of the same problem complex. This motivated the development of a method to examine linkages between problems across different attributes. In a sample of 62 analysed articles, the most frequently reported barriers were associated with the attributes Scale of Institutions , Development and Use of Knowledge and Actor Control . These barriers were frequently characterized by specific indicators. For instance, “fragmentation” commonly appeared as an indicator for Scale of Institutions , while “data fragmentation” was common for Development and Use of Knowledge . The developed approach support identification of institutional barriers in new cases and provides a basis for further systematic reviews. To end, we identify avenues for further research.