CUSTOMARY MARINE TENURE AS ENVIRONMENTAL LAW: REIMAGINING OCEAN JUSTICE

Abstract

Contemporary ocean governance remains predominantly state-centred despite increasing recognition that effective environmental protection requires legal frameworks capable of accommodating diverse normative traditions. Although customary marine tenure has received considerable scholarly attention within Indigenous rights, legal pluralism and community-based resource management, its status as environmental law has attracted comparatively little doctrinal analysis. This article argues that customary marine tenure constitutes environmental law because it establishes binding rules governing access to marine resources, ecological stewardship, conservation, dispute resolution and intergenerational responsibility. Adopting a doctrinal legal research methodology, it examines international environmental law, legal pluralist jurisprudence and comparative jurisprudence to determine whether customary marine tenure possesses the defining characteristics of environmental law. The analysis demonstrates that those characteristics depend upon the regulatory functions performed by a legal system rather than the institutional source from which its rules originate. It further shows that recognising customary marine tenure as environmental law provides a stronger jurisprudential foundation for ocean justice by acknowledging Indigenous marine legal institutions as complementary components of environmental governance operating within constitutional and statutory frameworks. A functional and pluralist understanding of environmental law therefore more accurately reflects the diversity of legal institutions through which marine environments have historically been governed.