Image

 ![Coastal research landscape used as the Northmoor University hero image.](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2026-01/camilo-botia-k4vFDPJoDZk-unsplash.1600x1200.jpg.avif?itok=ujHvC8nC)

 

 



Image

 ![Coastal research landscape used as the Northmoor University hero image.](/sites/default/files/styles/large/public/2026-01/camilo-botia-k4vFDPJoDZk-unsplash.1600x1200.jpg.avif?itok=ujHvC8nC)

 

 



Position title

Professor of Marine Policy

 

Person type

faculty

 

 

Email

n.brooks@northmoor.edu

 

Nathaniel Brooks studies the implementation gap in marine governance: the distance between a rule as written and the same rule as applied by an agency with a budget, a staff of four and a coastline to cover. His view, arrived at over twenty years and stated more bluntly each year, is that most governance failures are not failures of law.

Much of his recent work is on co-management arrangements, where a regulator shares authority with the people being regulated. These arrangements are popular in the literature and uneven in practice, and Brooks has spent several years documenting which conditions separate the two. Enforcement capacity turns out to matter less than whether the parties expect to still be dealing with each other in ten years.

He runs the policy clinic, in which students take on real casework for community organizations and small agencies that cannot afford analysis. Clinic students have testified at state hearings, drafted comment letters that changed a final rule, and, on at least one occasion, discovered that the agency they were writing to had lost its own file.

Brooks chairs the Department of Marine Policy and Economics. He teaches MPOL 240 Marine Law and Governance and MPOL 410 Coastal Community Resilience.



ORCID profile

[ORCID profile](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5540-2213)