Where policy, capital, and practice converge.
Independent assessment for funders, NGOs, and institutions investing in ocean conservation. A rigorous, clear-eyed read on a project's chances of delivering the impact it promises.
MANUS, PAPUA NEW GUINEA
Expertise
Governance Feasibility Assessment
Before capital commits, one question decides whether the investment delivers: does the governance and enforcement capacity exist to make it work? Legal due diligence and financial analysis both leave that gap. Our assessments fill it.
Policy Analysis & Advocacy
The policy questions behind healthy oceans and the communities that depend on them: fisheries, food security, marine spatial planning, and marine scientific research, researched and argued to move decisions.
Regional Strategy
How ocean decisions actually get made and enforced: Pacific politics, MPA compliance, BBNJ implementation, and fisheries governance, grounded in real relationships.
Ocean conservation rarely fails on paper. It fails on the water, where law, policy, and enforcement meet.
Ocean Accord exists to answer the question most people assume is already settled: can this project actually deliver, for the people who rely on the ocean and the funders backing it, and if not, what has to be in place first?
That means going deep into the governance frameworks a project depends on, testing whether the will and the capacity exist to make them hold, and naming the gaps that would sink it, or, once filled, let it succeed.
The practice is built on years of work alongside Pacific Island nations on how their waters are governed, and on a conviction that funders and communities both lose when good intentions outrun institutional reality.
Food security sits at the center of the work: the point where ocean policy touches daily life for the communities that depend on the sea. Whether we are assessing a project, writing a brief, or making the case for a policy, the job is one thing: turning what looks good on paper into what actually holds.
Jamie Jones is a lawyer and policy specialist trained in national security, strategy, and ocean science, with years of work alongside Pacific Island nations on the governance of their waters. Her focus is the intersection of fisheries, food security, and maritime enforcement, and the institutional conditions that determine whether ocean policy delivers in practice.
That focus is personal as much as professional. Trained first in agricultural journalism, Jamie has long seen conservation and food security as one cause and has published on food security as integral to maritime strategy. What draws her to the work is the people whose meals and livelihoods depend on well-governed waters.
She has designed and managed multi-year maritime governance initiatives across Southeast Asia and the Pacific: including Papua New Guinea, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Indonesia. She volunteers with Sharks Pacific in support of fisheries-related advocacy and shark conservation. She founded Ocean Accord to bring her experience to the funders, NGOs, and institutions investing in the ocean.
- Graduate Certificate, Ocean Policy & ScienceUniversity of Rhode Island Graduate School of Oceanography
- M.A., National Security & Strategic StudiesU.S. Naval War College
- J.D.Washburn University School of Law
- B.S., AgricultureKansas State University
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