• Ocean policy research
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.83-119
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• 2018

Under the Korean Marine Environment Management Act (hereunder, the KMEMA), the duty to arrange spill clean-up equipments, including spill clean-up vessels, required by the article 67 of the KMEMA is in essence the provision of public goods since it is a precautionary or preventive measure for the efficient performance of oil spill cleaning up. Also the obligation to control marine pollution and the duty to arrange of anti-pollution measures imposed on polluters is the obligation imposed by the public law in accordance with "the Polluter-Pays Principle". Therefore, the execution of such obligations shall be accompanied by the minimum legal and institutional arrangements. On the other hand, judging whether to form the roles of the public and private sectors in providing public goods is basically a matter of policy decision. However, even if the private sector is allowed to participate in the provision of public goods, it is imperative that a minimum requirement be provided to secure the public interest. Although major countries allows polluters to conclude a preliminary contract with a civil anti-pollution management company, these civilian institutions are in principle constituted by the owners of oil storage facilities. Additionally it is worth noting that it operates as a non-profit organization. In particular, if the practitioner performs pollution control for commercial purposes, their profitability may depend on the size of the pollution, the period spent on pollution control, the size of the equipment and manpower mobilized in the pollution control, and so on. Considering the above problems, caution should be taken to allow marine environmental management companies to be un-limitedly entrusted with the responsibility of arranging measures such as pollution control. In order to allow the marine environmental management contractor to be entrusted for the assignment of duty to protect the marine environment, the marine environment management business should be expanded so that the marine pollutant management capacity satisfies the statutory control capacity. For this purpose, it is necessary to manage and supervise the maintenance and improvement of the control capability of the marine environment management business. It is also necessary to discuss the introduction of the grading system for the control ability of the civil control companies alike in major countries.