Ocean Policy Lab
Social Science for Ocean Policy
The Ocean Policy Lab is part of the Oceans Department within the Doerr School of Sustainability at Stanford University. We pursue social science research that can inform and improve business and policy decisions around the ocean and increase our understanding of the tradeoffs involved with different uses of the marine environment. We aim to work across disciplines, integrating expertise in the natural sciences with perspectives from the social sciences to better understand the human dimensions of challenges facing the ocean, including climate change, overfishing, biodiversity loss, pollution, and more.
Research
Much of the ocean's biological and mineral wealth sits outside any single country's control. When a resource is shared, contested, or governed by no one in particular, conservation stops being solely a technical problem and becomes a strategic one as well.