Indian Ocean Rim Association

The Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) is a regional grouping of coastal states surrounding the Indian Ocean, headquartered in Ebene, Mauritius. It was established in 1997 as the Indian Ocean Rim Association for Regional Cooperation (IOR-ARC) and renamed IORA in 2013 to reflect a broader mandate beyond trade facilitation.

IORA's membership comprises 23 Member States from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, including Australia, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Iran, Kenya, the UAE, and Mauritius. It also recognizes a set of Dialogue Partners — among them the United States, China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the Republic of Korea, and the European Union — that participate in selected meetings without voting rights.

The association operates through a Council of Ministers (its apex body), a Committee of Senior Officials, a Secretariat, and specialized working groups. Decisions are taken by consensus. IORA structures its work around six priority areas: maritime safety and security; trade and investment facilitation; fisheries management; disaster risk management; academic, science and technology cooperation; and tourism and cultural exchanges. Two cross-cutting issues — the Blue Economy and women's economic empowerment — were formally added as focus areas at the 2014 Council of Ministers meeting in Perth and the 2017 Leaders' Summit in Jakarta, respectively.

The 2017 Jakarta Summit produced the IORA Concord, the organization's first leaders-level declaration, marking its 20th anniversary and committing members to a rules-based maritime order, freedom of navigation, and cooperation against piracy, illegal fishing, and trafficking.

IORA is often described as comparatively low-profile relative to ASEAN or the African Union, with limited budgetary resources and no binding dispute-settlement mechanism. Its significance lies in being the only pan–Indian Ocean intergovernmental forum, bridging states that otherwise lack a shared institutional platform amid growing strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific.