Ocean Leadership is an experience-based master’s program for professionals working in marine or maritime sectors who want to advance the green shift towards a sustainable future. The transdisciplinary program provides an understanding of the complex landscape of ocean challenges and builds the knowledge, skills, and capacity necessary to lead sustainable integrative solutions.

All life on Earth depends on the ocean. It generates oxygen, helps regulate the climate, sustains a rich diversity of lifeforms, and is a source of food, energy, medicine, recreation, and livelihoods for billions of people. However, the diverse demands on marine resources combined with increasing pressure from global challenges such as climate change, pollution, biodiversity loss and inequity currently threaten the ocean as a life-support system. To ensure sustainability and resilience, there is an urgent need to develop creative solutions that take advantage of the opportunities of the blue economy and address these challenges in an integrated manner.

This 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.

The Ocean Leadership program is dedicated to giving marine and maritime professionals the knowledge, skills and capacities they need to lead the shift towards more sustainable and resilient systems. As such, it emphasises systems-thinking and leadership in complexity, particularly working to enhance capacities for collaboration, integration, innovation and transformation. The cross-cutting themes that run throughout it’s mandatory courses, include: leadership and ethics, sustainability and resilience, law and governance, and digitalisation and innovation. The program uses a blended learning approach to teaching (combining physical gatherings with online modules), and is committed to a pedagogy that emphasises active, collaborative, integrative and reflective learning.

More information about the program is available here: https://uit.no/utdanning/program/718168/ocean_leadership_-_experience-based_master