Abstract

The establishment or enhancement of National Intersectoral Coordination Mechanisms (NICs) has been identified as a priority for the project on Catalysing Implementation of the Strategic Action Programme (SAP) for the Sustainable Management of shared Living Marine Resources in the Caribbean and North Brazil Shelf Large Marine Ecosystems (CLME+ Project, 2015 - 2020). However, NICs need to be well developed in order to strengthen governance arrangements and serve needs, not only for CLME+ project purposes. They are critical for countries and organizations in the Wider Caribbean Region with shared interests in specific aspects of marine policy (Mahon et al. 2010). NICs are designed based on the principles of good governance and are empirically flexible enough to accommodate different types of governance arrangements. They operate through nested policy cycles by creating well-coordinated two-way linkages between national and regional processes; local and national levels connect vertically, while lateral connections are established within countries (McConney et al. 2016). These linkages span both the social and ecological parts of governance systems, arrangements and institutions. NICs can be viewed as an operational arm within national governance frameworks (McConney et al. 2016) that carry out all or some of the five stages of a policy cycle. The large marine ecosystem (LME) governance framework is based on a multi-level system, with nested policy cycles aimed at governance effectiveness (i.e. governance effectiveness assessment framework – GEAF). Governance within countries can partly be assessed by how well their NICs perform. Guidelines were developed to assist stakeholders in perfecting the design and performance of NICs.

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