The TNC programme released ahead of the conference is notable for its thematic breadth. Across seven sessions spanning three days, TNC and its co-hosts will traverse the full spectrum of contemporary ocean governance: IUU fishing and electronic monitoring, climate-resilient coral reefs, High Seas Marine Protected Areas, the Blue 30×30 Roadmap, Africa Blue Carbon, mangrove conservation in the Western Indian Ocean, and marine spatial planning for sustainable Blue Economies in Kenya and Tanzania. As a programme, it is technically ambitious and politically sophisticated. It reflects an organisation that has invested deeply in translating scientific consensus into investable policy frameworks, and it acknowledges—in its very architecture—that Africa is no longer simply the beneficiary of ocean conservation initiatives but an increasingly active co-architect of them.
Yet precisely because of that ambition, these sessions deserve scrutiny from East African maritime professionals—not suspicion, but the kind of engaged, analytically rigorous examination that separates transformative multilateral commitments from well-packaged diplomatic theatre.
Consider the opening session on June 16: Accelerating Electronic Monitoring to Improve Fisheries Data, Compliance, and Combat IUU Fishing, hosted by the Food and Agriculture Organization. The emphasis on global coordination and African leadership is welcome. IUU fishing remains one of the most pernicious crimes afflicting East African waters—draining livelihoods, undermining food security, compromising artisanal fishing communities, and eroding the sovereign resource base of littoral states whose enforcement capacities remain chronically underfunded. But the question that must be asked is this: will African leadership here mean African ownership of data infrastructure, monitoring technology, and legislative frameworks? Or will it mean African participation in systems architected elsewhere, governed by external entities, and extracting fisheries intelligence that ultimately serves the monitoring priorities of distant flag states and commodity markets?
The distinction is not academic. Kenya, Tanzania, and their Indian Ocean neighbours have for decades been subjects of fisheries data collection rather than sovereigns of it. If Mombasa 2026 is to mark a genuine inflection point, the FAO and its conference partners must be pressed to articulate what concrete transfer of monitoring capability—not merely monitoring access—will accrue to coastal states in East Africa. The Veteran Seafarers Association and Kenya’s broader maritime professional community should attend these sessions not as passive observers but as institutional stakeholders prepared to register the expectations of the seafaring and coastal fishing communities they represent.
The session on Protecting Climate-Resilient Coral Reefs, co-hosted with the governments of Kenya, Panama, Vanuatu, and Zanzibar, is equally important. Kenya’s coral reef ecosystems along the Malindi-Watamu coast, within the Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park, and across the archipelagic stretches of the Lamu seascape are under simultaneous pressure from ocean warming, acidification, coastal development, destructive fishing practices, and inadequate enforcement of marine protected area regulations. Scheduled for June 16 from 4:00 to 5:15 PM in the Shimba Room, the session aims to move the conversation from political commitment to investable action—a formulation worth parsing carefully. Investable action implies mobilising private capital alongside public conservation finance. The terms on which that capital enters these ecosystems, who bears risk, who captures returns, and how local communities retain agency over their reef-adjacent livelihoods, will determine whether this is conservation finance or conservation displacement by a more elegant name.
The OOC11 Plenary Floor Announcement on June 17, in which TNC’s Regional Managing Director for Africa, Ademola Ajagbe, will announce TNC’s commitment to establishing the first generation of High Seas Marine Protected Areas, represents the most geopolitically consequential moment in the TNC programme. The High Seas Treaty—formally the Agreement under UNCLOS on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction—has been celebrated internationally as a landmark legal achievement. But its implementation will be contentious. Developing nations have legitimate concerns about whether High Seas MPA architecture will be designed in ways that restrict their access to the biological resources of the open ocean while their own Exclusive Economic Zones continue to be exploited, legally and illegally, by distant-water fishing fleets from more powerful states. Kenya and Tanzania, as Indian Ocean coastal nations with growing maritime ambitions, cannot afford to receive this announcement as passive applause. They should arrive in the plenary with positions, questions, and red lines.
The June 18 session on Africa Blue Carbon—co-hosted with the Kenya Marine and Fisheries Research Institute—is perhaps the most directly consequential for coastal communities in the East African littoral. Blue carbon markets, centred on the sequestration potential of mangroves, seagrasses, and tidal marshes, have attracted enormous speculative interest from global carbon offset buyers. Kenya’s Mikoko Pamoja project in Gazi Bay has gained international recognition as a pioneering community-based blue carbon model. But the broader entry of institutional investors and carbon credit intermediaries into Kenya’s coastal ecosystems raises questions about land tenure, community consent, benefit-sharing structures, and the long-term governance of ecosystems that have historically been managed—not always perfectly, but meaningfully—by communities with generational relationships to those shores.
The simultaneous session on Scaling Mangrove Conservation and Investments in the Western Indian Ocean—co-hosted with Wetlands International Eastern Africa, the Global Mangrove Alliance Kenya, and Conservation International—amplifies these concerns. The Western Indian Ocean harbours some of the most ecologically significant mangrove ecosystems on the planet. East Africa holds a substantial portion of the world’s remaining mangrove cover. Scaling conservation investment in these ecosystems is necessary and urgent. But scaling without robust community land rights, transparent benefit-sharing, and integration of indigenous and local knowledge risks converting conservation finance into a new modality of coastal enclosure—one that dispossesses communities not through bulldozers and development permits but through conservation agreements that extinguish customary access rights in exchange for carbon credit revenues that may or may not materialise equitably.
The closing session on June 18, Kenya and Tanzania—Advancing Marine Spatial Planning for Sustainable Blue Economies in the Western Indian Ocean, co-hosted with the governments of both countries, is in many respects the session with the most direct bearing on the long-term maritime futures of both nations. Marine Spatial Planning is the institutional architecture through which a state determines how its ocean space is allocated—between shipping, fishing, offshore energy, conservation, aquaculture, tourism, and subsistence use. Done well, it is the instrument through which Blue Economy ambitions are given geographic coherence and legal form. Done poorly, or without adequate stakeholder participation, it becomes a planning instrument that rationalises the marginalisation of small-scale fishers, artisanal communities, and the seafaring workforce in favour of large-scale industrial and conservation interests.
The joint Kenya-Tanzania framing of this session is diplomatically significant. The two countries share a maritime boundary, shared fisheries stocks, shared piracy threat vectors, and shared developmental challenges in their coastal zones. That they appear at this conference as co-architects of a regional marine spatial planning framework is a positive signal. But institutional memory in both countries’ maritime sectors should caution against optimism not grounded in the practicalities of interagency coordination, maritime authority capacity, and community participation infrastructure on the ground.
From the vantage point of the Veteran Seafarers Association and Kenya’s maritime professional community, the broader significance of Our Ocean Mombasa 2026 lies not in its programme alone but in what it reveals about the moment Kenya’s maritime sector occupies. Mombasa is hosting a conference previously convened in Washington, Bali, Malta, Oslo, Palau, Nairobi (in 2018), and Lisbon. That the conference returns to the African continent—specifically to Kenya’s maritime capital—at a moment when the Global South is pressing for more equitable architectures in climate finance, ocean governance, and multilateral conservation policymaking is not coincidental. It places obligations on Kenya’s maritime institutions—the Kenya Maritime Authority, the Kenya Ports Authority, the Kenya Coast Guard Service, the Kenya Fisheries Service, Bandari Maritime Academy, and the professional associations of the seafaring sector—to engage this conference not merely as hosts and spectators but as substantive interlocutors capable of shaping the commitments made in Mombasa’s name.
The TNC programme is well-constructed. The organisations co-hosting these sessions—FAO, KMFRI, Wetlands International, Conservation International, and the governments of Kenya and Tanzania—carry institutional weight. But good programmes do not automatically produce equitable outcomes. The outcomes of Mombasa 2026 will be shaped, in no small measure, by whether East African maritime professionals, coastal community advocates, and national maritime institutions are sufficiently present, sufficiently prepared, and sufficiently vocal in the rooms where these conversations unfold.
That is the challenge this conference places before Kenya’s maritime sector. Mombasa has always been more than a port. It is a city whose relationship with the Indian Ocean is inscribed in its architecture, its commerce, its culture, and its people. The ocean governance frameworks agreed upon at Our Ocean 2026 will reach into the lives of the coastal fishing families of Shimba Hills and the Lamu Archipelago, into the career prospects of marine cadets at Bandari Maritime Academy, and into the operational environment of the seafarers who crew the vessels that sustain East African trade. The professionals and institutions who carry the mandates of those communities owe it to them to be fully and critically engaged with every session, every commitment, and every pledge made under the Mombasa sun this June.
Andrew Mwangura is an independent maritime consultant and Chairman of the Veteran Seafarers Association, based in Mombasa, Kenya. He writes on maritime governance, Blue Economy policy, port affairs, and African maritime issues.