The Pacific Islands occupy a vast area that spans the Western Pacific Ocean and are blessed with a wealth of resources. However global environmental challenges like overfishing and climate change threaten these valuable resources. Overfishing results in depleted fish stocks and with climate change, sea levels are likely to rise, natural disasters may increase and displacement of fish stocks is likely.

There are opportunities to address these challenges and work with the many regional and national stakeholders and institutions that seek to promote sustainable use of our oceans resources and increase resilience to disasters. However, these opportunities require cooperation, collaboration, knowledge sharing and good decision-making processes at every governance level and to be effective must be based on a good understanding of the Pacific Island nation’s law and governance contexts.

Through our services we hope to contribute to the discourse, provide expert analysis on the law and governance contexts, promote a collaborative approach to decision making and encourage good governance at every level. This is why our firm has specialised in oceans law and policy.

We undertake our oceans law work under the banner Oceans Law and Policy Services, Pacific, and amongst other things, we produce an oceans law bulletin that aims to increase knowledge of the Fiji and Pacific governance context and topical oceans issues. Our bulletins can be found in Legal Resources and are published periodically and regional experts are reporting that the bulletins are shaping up to be a valuable source of legal information in the region.

Our Oceans Law and Policy Services team is led by James Sloan who has a particular interest and focus on the legal and governance contexts in Fiji and other Pacific Islands and administrative law. Oceans Law is a wide topic and it encompasses a variety of legal areas including the Law of the Sea, International law, environmental law and administrative law.