Harmonizing Marine Governance: A Framework for the Greater Bay Area

The fundamental challenge of cross-boundary marine governance in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area lies in the tension between the spatial continuity of marine ecosystems and the divergence of the rules governing them across the three jurisdictions. Drawing on comparative legal analysis, doctrinal interpretation, and case studies including the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge, Shenzhen Bay Port, the University of Macau’s Hengqin campus, and the authorization concerning the land and maritime areas southeast of Gongbei Port, this article identifies major obstacles to rule coordination in the Greater Bay Area. Sea-area entitlements are legally fragmented into rights of different juridical nature, environmental impact assessment and ecological compensation procedures lack equivalence across jurisdictions, and locally developed practices of vertically stratified sea-area use are becoming increasingly disconnected from the predominantly planar framework of the national Sea Areas Use Management Law. This article argues that the appropriate response is not to pursue identical legal forms, but to establish the principle of “functional equivalence”. Where a cross-boundary project requires a Special Administrative Region to exercise jurisdiction beyond its ordinary territorial scope, functional equivalence should be supplemented by central authorization. At the same time, timely reform of the mainland’s higher-level legal framework is a necessary precondition for deeper cross-boundary coordination. In addition, once existing soft-law cooperation in the Greater Bay Area has matured, it should gradually be transformed into binding intergovernmental obligations and internalized through functionally equivalent domestic rules, supported by operational mechanisms for joint monitoring, coordinated enforcement, and information sharing. The Greater Bay Area experience demonstrates that effective cross-boundary ocean governance does not require the elimination of legal diversity. Rather, it requires the construction of effective legal interfaces among different jurisdictions, enabling otherwise autonomous legal orders to become mutually intelligible and operationally compatible, and ultimately allowing shared marine space to be governed as an integrated whole.