Size Matters
Scale changes the work.
When Big Ocean formed in 2010, its six founding sites were the largest marine protected areas in the world. Big Ocean adopted 150,000km² as a working threshold for the field they represented. Many of today’s large-scale MPAs extend far beyond that original threshold, but it remains a useful marker.
Scale changes the work. Sheer area, distance, remoteness, and the number of relationships and managing agencies involved create management demands that do not arise in the same way at smaller scales.
People + capacity
Practice lives in people.
Much of what it takes to manage well at scale is learned through experience. Big Ocean builds capacity in the people doing that work and creates ways for experience to move between practitioners, places, and generations.
That work includes practitioner convenings, peer exchange, co-produced tools and research, and partnerships designed around real management needs.
Beyond Designation
The field is bigger than a category.
Big Ocean's deepest experience comes from legally established large-scale MPAs in national waters, but large-scale ocean governance is evolving. Communities and governments are proposing new areas; Indigenous Peoples are advancing recognition and governance across ancestral ocean territories; OECMs and other area-based approaches are growing; multi-national and whole-domain initiatives are connecting management across vast regions; and high-seas systems are now being built.
Big Ocean connects accumulated practice with this wider field without requiring every place to become the same kind of designation.
Experience moves through people.
Big Ocean creates the relationships that let hard-won practice travel between places, practitioners, and generations.
Meet the people