Governance accounts provide a structured record of the rules, institutions and management arrangements that govern ocean spaces and are compatible with the Ocean Accounts framework.
**Governance accounts provide a structured record of the rules, institutions and management arrangements that govern ocean spaces. **Within the Ocean Accounts Framework, they are designed for regular compilation, standardised reporting and direct integration with environmental and economic accounts. They complement the social domain of ocean accounts by documenting the institutional arrangements that structure ocean use, while social accounts assess how governance decisions affect communities, cultural practices and equity.
Watch: Yvonne Waweru introduces Governance Accounts
Like other components of the Ocean Accounts Framework, governance accounts organise information through the accounting principles of stocks and flows. Governance stocks record the institutional arrangements at a given point in time — the spatial extent of jurisdictions and management areas, the authorities responsible for specific ocean spaces, the laws and regulations that apply within them, co-management agreements, customary governance systems and enforcement capacity.
Governance flows track the activities and transactions those arrangements generate over a defined accounting period — from management expenditure, tax and subsidy allocations and licensing revenues through to enforcement actions, stakeholder participation in decision-making and regulatory changes.
Ocean governance is usually fragmented across sectoral authorities. Fisheries, shipping, energy, conservation and tourism each fall under separate agencies operating under distinct mandates and legal frameworks. Many frameworks already assess governance quality in specific contexts — from marine protected area management to fisheries performance and regional arrangements — but these assessments are typically one-off exercises, built for particular institutional purposes, and lack the standardised methods needed for cross-jurisdictional comparison or integration with economic and environmental data.
Decision-makers often lack systematic information on which authorities and rules apply to specific ocean areas, whether governance investment matches management priorities, and how governance quality relates to environmental and economic outcomes. Governance accounts address this gap by embedding governance information within a statistical framework designed for regular compilation, cross-jurisdictional comparison and analytical integration with other ocean accounts.
Governance accounts support better ocean management through three connected functions.
Mapping governance architecture. Governance accounts document which authorities, laws and management measures apply to specific ocean areas. This reveals institutional overlaps, regulatory gaps and spatial conflicts. Standardised methods enable comparison across jurisdictions and administrative boundaries, exposing where adjacent ocean areas face inconsistent or contradictory rules.
Tracking governance resources and implementation. Governance accounts record the monetary and non-monetary flows associated with ocean governance — government expenditure on management, regulatory revenues, enforcement actions and stakeholder participation. This goes beyond market-valued transactions to capture governance activities that significantly affect ocean sustainability but lack conventional economic valuation.
Connecting governance to outcomes. Because governance accounts sit alongside environmental and economic accounts, they make it possible to analyse how governance quality relates to ecological and economic outcomes. This capacity to link how ocean areas are governed with the condition of their ecosystems and the performance of their economies is where governance accounting has the most to offer.
The Ocean Accounts of Indonesia study in the Gili Matra Marine Protected Area demonstrated both the feasibility and the analytical value of governance accounts. The pilot revealed:
These insights only became visible when governance was documented systematically alongside environmental and economic data.
Governance accounts remain an evolving, experimental component of the Ocean Accounts Framework. They go beyond established statistical standards, such as the System of National Accounts (SNA) and the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), to incorporate qualitative and relational information alongside quantitative data.
The Global Ocean Accounts Partnership is working on developing the method and pilot testing these accounts with support from Ocean Accounts Fellows such as Hadi Yoga Dewanto and Yvonne Waweru. Their research is developing standardised frameworks for measuring governance quality, constructing cross-jurisdictional indicators and systematically linking governance information with environmental and economic accounts.
The aim is to move governance accounts from descriptive inventories to analytical tools that identify governance gaps, assess regulatory effectiveness and reveal how institutional arrangements shape marine resource outcomes.
Achieving the full potential of governance accounts requires collaboration among national statistical agencies, marine management authorities, researchers and international partnerships such as the Global Ocean Accounts Partnership.
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