IOI-Canada’s Ocean Governance Training Program

To understand the rationale for the establishment of the IOI-Canada Training Program, one must consider and appreciate the early life of Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918–2002), the founder of the International Ocean Institute (ioi). Her 1999 Nexus Institute lecture, “The Years of My Life,”1 provides an autobiographical insight into her privileged upbringing among globally acknowledged intellectuals and the Mann family’s escape from Nazi Germany, prior to the Second World War, first to Switzerland and eventually to the United States. Her interests were eclectic, and even at a young age she could be passionately single-minded, for example, her life-long love of the ocean. She met Professor G.A. Borgese in Princeton, New Jersey in 1938 and married him in 1939. In 1946 Chancellor Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago launched a Committee to Frame a World Constitution as a response to the debacle of the Second World War. Elisabeth Mann Borgese became an active participant in the work of the Committee. In 1948 the Chicago Preliminary Draft of a World Constitution was published, and one of its provisions declared that earth, water, air and energy were “the common property of the human race,”2 a foretaste of things to come! Later that decade, the Korean War and McCarthyism contributed to the demise of world federalism and the ideals developed, perhaps naively, by the Chicago team. Consequently the Borgeses moved to Italy where Professor Borgese died in 1952 at age 70. In 1964, Dr. Hutchins established the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions (csdi), an antidote to McCarthyism, in Santa Barbara, California. In 1967, he invited Elisabeth Mann Borgese to become a Fellow of the Center and offered her a three-year project to draft a constitution for the oceans. Coincidently that same year, Arvid Pardo, Ambassador of Malta to the United Nations (UN), presented his seminal address to the UN entitled ‘The Common