Ocean Leadership - professional masters degree

Ocean Leadership is a part-time experience-based master’s program targetting professionals working in marine or maritime sectors who want to advance the blue/green shift towards a sustainable future. The transdisciplinary program aims to build the knowledge, skills, qualities, and capacities necessary to lead innovative and integrative approaches to creating sustainable ocean futures.

To ensure ocean sustainability and resilience, there is an urgent need to develop creative approaches that take advantage of the opportunities of the blue economy and address the critical global challenges in an integrated manner. Doing this effectively requires a new generation of leaders. Leaders who can navigate conflicting values and interests to integrate knowledge and action across different scientific disciplines, marine sectors, and levels of governance. As well as leaders able to leverage the power and promise of the digital era through effective engagement with cutting edge information and communication technologies (ICT).

The Ocean Leadership program builds awareness of interconnected ocean challenges and enhances capacities for collaboration, integration and transformation so that participants are well placed to help lead the shift towards more sustainable and resilient systems. Through the program, professionals from different ocean sectors come together to share their knowledge and experience, learn about sustainability from across natural and social science disciplines, and build their skills in leadership, collaboration and innovation.

Ocean Leadership is a 3-year, part-time, program. The first two years are dedicated to coursework, while the third year focuses on completing a project of relevance to the participant’s professional work environment. The interdisciplinary courses (specific to the program) are taught through a combination of physical gatherings with face-face teaching (2 weeks per semester), online modules completed independently, monthly virtual meet ups, and group work on projects related to real-world ocean sustainability challenges.

In addition to systems thinking and sustainability, cross-cutting themes of the program include: leadership, law and governance, and digitalisation. With a focus on building capacity for leadership under conditions of complexity, the program emphasises collaborative, transformative and adaptive styles of leadership. To advance good governance, the program provides insight into a range of relevant legal regimes . The focus on digitalisation recognises that the ongoing development of digital tools and technologies is not only changing the way we communicate and do business in the 21st century, but is also opening up exciting new ways to understand the complexity of ocean systems and address sustainability challenges.

The program uses an active, integrative and reflective approach to teaching and learning. This means participants are given significant scope to bring their own experience and expertise into the program. Since the interdisciplinary program provides knowledge from across social and natural sciences, the focus on integrative learning encourages looking for and exploring connections across different fields, as well as connections between the course materials and professional work environments. With a focus on reflective learning, the participants are encouraged to regularly analyse their own actions and learning, with an aim towards continuous improvement.