The management of natural resources is changing paradigm from sustainable yields to sustainable ecosystems. This new paradigm is termed ecosystem management which is primarily about human values and their capacity to incorporate the best scientific knowledge, while everyday we are reminded that the relationship between humans and the environment may be approaching dangerous and irreversible thresholds. The adaptive capacity we need is much about changes to current institutions, depending on the governance pattern to be considered at different temporal and spatial scales, between different groups of stakeholders living and acting on different but interconnected ecological systems and interacting each other hierarchically. Yet, at the international and national level, governance systems are gradually changing throughout a triad of actors which are the states and intergovernmental organizations, the market forces, and the civil society. Referring to 72% of the planet, i.e. the coasts, small islands and the oceans deserve a coherent global governance system as in the case of the water or climate change issues. Besides UN-Ocean, an IPCC-like organisation covering the whole maritime basin, taking the name of Intergovernmental Panel on Maritime Basins (IPMB), could well contribute to feed the governance system with shared and reliable information leading to more coherent responses from existing but poorly or uncoordinated suite of organisations and initiatives on the coast and the ocean.