With around 90% of global trade currently transported by ship (OECD 2021), maritime and shipping governance issues are of great significance in global affairs. International organizations, states and NGOs have asserted that significant governance gaps remain in maritime affairs, in respect of decarbonization, seafarers' rights, and pollution. According to some scholars, private actors have exercised a largely obstructive influence regarding many regulatory priorities in maritime governance in recent decades (Roe 2013). In keeping with a longstanding 'seablindness' (Bueger, Edmunds 2017) in Political Science and International Relations, however, the understanding of the shipping industry's role in shaping the regulation and governance of the oceans remains limited. While there is some recognition that shipping actors, the lifeblood of the global supply chain, comprise the most important constituency of private authority in global maritime policy arenas, many questions about their involvement in maritime governance remain unanswered. How is the influence of shipping enacted across multiple levels of maritime governance? In what ways has the extent and practice of this influence changed over time? How, and in what ways, does the influence of shipping inhibit more effective maritime governance? Focusing on three sites of governance - the International Maritime Organization, European Union and UK Government - this project aims to answer such questions, providing the first comprehensive study of the governance practices of the shipping industry in maritime affairs. This will be enabled by drawing on recent theoretical advances in International Relations. In line with broader trends in global governance, maritime policy processes have exhibited new forms of complexity in recent decades. Processes of contestation and decision-making are now increasingly enmeshed in (for example) conference receptions, scientific consultations, and collaborative research and development. To examine such forms of governance, however, advanced theoretical and methodological tools are required. Accordingly, this study draws on assemblage theory and international practice theory. The latter is a theoretical and methodological tradition that identifies practices as the foremost units for understanding social relations, and which has emerged in the last ten years to explore the full diversity of the processes through which power is enacted in global politics. Focusing in particular on practices through which actors build perceptions of competence and authority, the project will explore a wide range of practices enacted both within and adjacent to policy arenas in maritime governance, and trace these across the trajectory of ocean governance in the post-1948 period. Overall, therefore, this project seeks to make contributions to two bodies of scholarship. Firstly, enabled by its conceptual focus on practice, the study will establish how private power functions in maritime affairs, seeking to theorize private authority in maritime rule-making; these questions remain largely overlooked in maritime governance and policy literature. Secondly, due to the distinctiveness of maritime affairs, the project promises to make important contributions to broader literatures on private power and emergence in transnational governance, examining forms of practice that have hitherto been afforded little attention in Political Science. Additionally, through the creation of an open knowledge network encompassing all of the project's research partners and contacts, it seeks to bring to a practitioner audience new understandings of the dynamics between the politics of shipping and existing regulatory gaps in maritime affairs. The project will adopt a mixed-methods approach, undertaking around one hundred semi-structured interviews on current and recent governance practices, along with participant observation and extensive archival research.

Like energy and automotive before it, UK freight transport is now on the cusp of a socio-technical transition away from fossil fuel dependency. This transition will require major investment to fleet and infrastructure, cause disruption to assets and business models, and will trigger significant reconfiguration. Whilst the scaling up of fossil phase-out is most likely to occur from the 2030s onwards, the next 10 years of investments are critical to enabling the transition, and to mitigating transition risks to the "hard to abate" freight sectors, and by association UK trade. Our concept to address this challenge is for a Network of broad but interconnected academic excellence integrated with key and leading stakeholders in freight decarbonisation, that collaboratively develops and applies knowledge and understanding of rapid freight decarbonisation. We will use this Network to collect and distil current knowledge, as well as to identify and de-risk the key remaining research challenges that can unleash significant freight-decarbonisation targeted investment and guide enabling policy. This Network connects five freight transport investments made by the EPSRC with a track record of a whole systems approach to decarbonisation of UK freight flows (international and national), and of closely integrating and embedding research with industry and policy makers alike. The Network's efforts will be guided by a number of features of UK freight transport including: (i) significant fixed infrastructure with long timescales for investment (ii) lack of consensus on the specific technological solutions for each mode (iii) a complex combination of national and international transport systems (iv) besides the road and rail network, a limited scope for public sector investment (v) Complex governance involving a mix of UK, EU and international (UN) regulation. The Network will align and integrate directly with UK government and existing initiatives including (i) Industrial strategy (ii) Clean Growth Strategy (iii) Road to zero (iv) Clean Maritime Council (v) UN agency fora (vi) World Bank's Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition (vii) ongoing work on aligning investment to decarbonisation with: European Investment Bank, UK private sector institutions, IFC and IMF, and leading investment NGOs: 2 degrees investing, World Economic Forum, Global Maritime Forum, Global Shippers Forum, UK FTA. To achieve this Network's objective of unleashing significant investment for freight decarbonisation, it is organised into five multi-modal and cross-cutting thematic areas and executed through a three-step approach: Theme 1: Role of data and models for unlocking implementation decision making Theme 2: Managing macroeconomic, policy and technology uncertainty, whilst mitigating climate risk in investment decisions Theme 3: Fuel and propulsion technology pathways Theme 4: Aligning drivers for decarbonisation investment/policy with local (inc. air pollution), UK, EU and Global climate policy and integrating into private sector decision making Theme 5. Coupling the evolution of logistics with decarbonizing freight Step 1: Refinement of current knowledge and perspectives into a focused set of research questions covering each of the five themes Step 2: Commissioning of a series (~13) small projects which can develop further understanding of these questions and the methods suitable for addressing them Step 3: Distillation of the Network's knowledge, in combination with the outputs of the small projects, to produce a strategy to drive freight decarbonisation investment, and an agenda and plan describing a series of further collaboration and funding activity that can sustain the Network