EU Maritime Safety Policy and the International Regime, 1975–2015: Summing-up and Conclusions

This chapter sums up and draws historical lines from the previous chapters on how and why private and public governance of international maritime safety changed from the 1970s to the end of the 2010s. It summarises how domestic and regional European policy processes were influenced by external events in the form of shipwrecks, and how these regional processes in turn interacted with the economics of the shipping industry and the international maritime safety regime. It substantiates that through history several actors—private and public—have played their part. The chapter draws conclusions on why the maritime (ship) classification societies came to play such an important, while not always equally visible, part in international maritime safety and environmental regulation. From their origins as rating agencies serving the need of underwriters and cargo owners to identify risk, these organisations—together with governments, primarily as flag states—have long been at the core of the regime’s rulemaking and compliance oversight. The chapter also concludes that the relative importance of government flag state statutory regulation versus private classification rules and standards has varied over time, but the two have increasingly come to overlap. It concludes that the steady growth in open registries—or flags of convenience (FOC)—and the parallel increase in delegation of statutory tasks from governments to classification societies acting as recognised organisations (ROs), has accentuated the situation. At the end, and despite the book’s analytical focus ending in 2015, this final chapter also includes some thoughts on the future and potential areas for further study.