["Environmental Policy and Governance, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nOcean governance presents one of the most complex environmental policy challenges of our time, requiring coordinated action across multiple scales, sectors and stakeholder groups. This paper applies institutional work theory to systematically examine how actors create, maintain and disrupt the governance arrangements underpinning ocean sustainability and marine conservation finance. Through a comprehensive review of 107 peer‐reviewed articles, we identify patterns of institutional work across the ocean governance literature. Our findings reveal a predominant emphasis on institutional creation (100% of articles) and maintenance (91% of articles), with comparatively less attention to disruptive institutional actions (57% of articles). Statistical analysis using tetrachoric correlations demonstrates significant relationships between institutional work subcategories, suggesting that effective ocean governance requires coordinated action across multiple institutional dimensions. We show that these correlations disclose three recurring configurations of institutional work, namely enabling creation, normative maintenance and disruptive realignment and that the maintenance and disruptive configurations are largely decoupled across the review of literature. Building on this finding, we propose an integrated model in which ocean sustainability outcomes depend on the coupling of these configurations rather than on the volume of any single form of work. The model is stated as four testable propositions and identifies the agents positioned to carry each configuration together with the barriers to coupling them in a fragmented governance landscape. The paper contributes to environmental governance scholarship by demonstrating how institutional work theory can inform practical strategies for enhancing ocean sustainability.\n"]