Positionality Statement

The Marine Safety Investigation Unit (MSIU) is articulating its positionality, i.e., the position which its maritime safety investigators are adopting, in terms of their ontological and epistemological beliefs, to effectively implement the safety investigation obligations prescribed in the relevant IMO and EU instruments and the National legislation.

This statement provides a reflection of how MSIU’s maritime safety investigators conduct their safety investigations, and how their positionality influences:

• what accident data is analysed;
• how it is analysed; and, eventually
• the logic behind the safety investigation reports.

The MSIU is Malta’s national maritime safety investigation body, and its safety investigators understand the importance of independent and impartial safety investigations. They are aware that the safety investigation of maritime accidents and incidents involving Maltese registered ships is Malta’s responsibility and are an integral part of the enforcement process of international maritime conventions to which Malta is a signatory State, and the relevant European Union directives and regulations. They are also cognizant of Malta’s right as a substantially interested State, in terms of international maritime conventions and relevant European Union directives and regulations, to either investigate or participate in the safety investigation of maritime accidents and incidents occurring in Maltese waters but involving foreign flagged ships.

Although the MSIU is funded by the Authority for Transport in Malta (TM), it does not fall under any of TM’s Directorates and the Head of Marine Safety Investigation reports directly to the Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Capital Projects. While all MSIU officials are TM employees, the MSIU’s office and data storage facilities are located remotely from TM’s maritime directorates, thus ensuring segregation and confidentiality of safety investigation data.

The MSIU has no vested commercial interests and rather than a client / customer base, the MSIU interacts with interested States and parties, as defined in the relevant maritime instruments.

Recognising MSIU’s sole remit to promote and contribute to the safety of life at sea and the protection of the marine environment, the MSIU’s safety investigators collect and analyse accident data only to understand accident dynamics from a safety perspective. Inspired by a constructivist research philosophy, safety investigations are influenced by the safety investigators’ cultural diversity, academic and professional backgrounds, and seafaring careers, having served on various types of ships in the merchant navy.

The MSIU’s safety investigators are actively conscious of hindsight and counterfactual biases and fallacies. They appreciate that the way they see and understand post-accident data does not necessarily mirror how that same data had been seen and understood by the seafarers and ship companies’ officials just before the accident / incident occurred. Hence, they give significant attention to contextual factors.

The MSIU’s safety investigators do not investigate to apportion blame and determine liabilities. They acknowledge and respect the weight, which legal concepts such as fault, recklessness and negligence carry in judicial settings, but submit that for the purpose of safety investigations’ findings, these concepts have no value, legal or otherwise.

The MSIU’s safety investigators do not endorse the Newtonian-Cartesian paradigm of accident causation. Instead, they commit to the following five principles:

1. Human errors are not the cause of accidents but symptoms of deeper, complex, non-linear system interactions, manifested through the actions and inactions of persons within the socio-technical system, and whose geo-physical location may have been in proximity of the accident site;

2. Human errors are mere ex post facto constructs. They appear critical and real only when analysed in hindsight, from the ‘out-in’ viewpoint. Instead, safety investigators study system interactions from the ‘in-out’ perspective;

3. Seafarers do not cause accidents; rather, they create safety when negotiating system uncertainties to bridge the gap between work-as-imagined / prescribed and work-as-done;

4. The role of the safety investigators is not to judge behaviour, but to understand and explain why decisions, which only appear faulty with the benefit of hindsight, would have made perfect sense before the accident happened;

5. Safety investigations are based on holism rather than reductionism, deconstruction, and dualism paradigms; the whole is greater than the sum of any socio-technical system’s constituent parts.