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Mining the seabed, enclosing the Area: proprietary knowledge and the geopolitics of the extractive frontier beyond national jurisdiction: Mining the seabed, enclosing the Area
Abstract
Over the past 15 years the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the United Nations agency charged with regulating extraction from the ocean floor and seabed in areas beyond national jurisdiction (a zone referred to as the “Area”), has assigned exploration contracts for deep sea mineral exploration for specific zones under its purview. Pressures have mounted in recent years for a rapid roll out of an ISA mineral exploitation regime. Under international law, the deep seabed pertains to the entire global community under the principle of the common heritage of (hu)mankind. Parastatal and private firms granted rights by the UN and/or their home states for exploration prior to the ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), are among the actors in these contracts. They include US firms, notably Lockheed Martin, which participated in deep‐sea mining consortia in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper argues that the neo‐mercantilist dynamics surrounding ISA negotiations show how the geopolitics of proprietary data and political economy of finance constitute the deep seabed. The power certain states and firms hold in shaping the ISA exploitation regime arises in part from the contested legal position of ocean frontiers beyond state jurisdiction.
... Furthermore, it was watered down in the UNCLOS 1994 Implementing Agreement for Part XI (the Area) (UN, 1994), which introduced neoliberal market logic as a guiding principle for the seabed regime, in keeping with the broader global embrace of neoliberalism from the 1990s, including in relation to the environment (Brockington et al., 2008). Nevertheless, the Common Heritage Principle retains political meaning and is mobilized today in negotiations for extending ocean governance in ABNJ Vadrot et al., 2022;Zalik, 2018). ...
... Key firms active at the ISA today, including Lockheed Martin, are the descendants of, and still hold the knowledge generated from seabed exploration by, so-called 'pioneer investors' who were active prior to UNCLOS ratification and whose research was protected from UNCLOS technology transfer and access and benefit sharing requirements under the 1994 Implementing Agreement. Firms that descended from the original 'pioneer investors' hold exploration/ exploitation contracts with the International Seabed Authority today, meaning that they make use of their pioneer data for private gain (Hayashi, 1989;Larson, 1986;Zalik, 2018). In the present, scientific research is deployed in ways that advance, and unite, conservation and extraction efforts in the seabed. ...
... In the present, scientific research is deployed in ways that advance, and unite, conservation and extraction efforts in the seabed. On the extractive side, mining firms need and use baseline data to secure financing for extractive projects: proof of the economic viability of potential ventures, including projections of future returns that are essential for securing financial support for costly extractive projects (Zalik, 2015(Zalik, , 2018(Zalik, , 2021Roth et al., 2018; see in contrast Thiele et al., 2021). Yet, the nexus is evident: the designation of the conservation areas is inseparable from such extractive activities (and efforts to finance them) since they too are identified in part through the scientific findings from mining exploration expeditions (Smith et al., 2020). ...
Recent years have seen a sharp uptick in efforts to expedite resource extraction in, and expand biodiversity conservation to, Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), the ~70% of oceans outside state space. In this symposium piece, we explore the co‐constitution of the parallel acceleration of biodiversity conservation and economic exploitation that is unfolding in ways unique to the high seas, but consistent with global patterns wherein this coupling encloses space for capitalist value extraction. These coupled tendencies are part of expanded ocean regulation and, in ABNJ, they form part of state‐capital advancement into one of the remaining world frontiers. We explore this extraction‐conservation nexus in two contemporary ABNJ negotiations: 1) the Implementing Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction and 2) the International Seabed Authority's development of an exploitation regime for deep‐seabed mining in the Area. Our findings build on insights from agrarian political economy and political ecology that establish the co‐constitution – rather than incommensurability – of conservation and extractive activities in terrestrial spaces and draw out the arenas of this nexus in the ecologically complex, political‐economic grey zone that is the uninhabited (by humans), non‐state space of the planet. This work contributes to placing the high seas and the emergent blue economy within the critical scholarship that describes and explores the conservation‐extraction nexus and its consequences.
... Growing recognition of the ocean as a critical global conservation concern is increasingly pitted against a 'blue economy' agenda that casts it as a new economic frontier, ripe for exploitation and industrialization (Campbell et al. 2016;Barbesgaard 2018). These tensions coalesce around the current global rush to explore, enclose, and ultimately extract the mineral wealth of the deep seabed, which includes 'strategically important' rare earth elements and minerals that are deemed essential to meeting the battery demands of the carbon transition (Zalik 2018). The Pacific Ocean has long been at the forefront of this global deepsea mining (DSM) frontier. ...
... There is a nascent body of work that has been applying the concepts of resource-making, materiality, and resource frontiers to DSM, including some studies that have focused on the Pacific. This work has focused on the geopolitics of regulation in the Area (Zalik 2018, Ranganathan 2019; the ways in which the materiality of the deep-sea environment has been mobilised by both DSM firms and Indigenous community-led resistance groups to construct competing discourses of DSM in the context of the Solwara 1 DSM project in Papua New Guinea (PNG) (Childs 2019(Childs , 2020; the role of unpredictable interactions between different actor-networks in the recent unravelling of the Solwara 1 project (Filer et al. 2021); the need to extend beyond the conventional focus on state-led processes of territorialisation to consider "the shifting temporalities of deep-sea resource making" (Childs 2018:3; also see Le Meur et al. 2018); the different geographies and actors that shape the geopolitics of DSM (Childs 2022); and, finally, the "open-ended, reversible and sometimes incomplete process" of resource-making demonstrated by the history of nodules and the UNCLOS III negotiations (Sparenberg 2019:843). This chapter builds upon and extends this literature by providing the first comprehensive account of the history of resource-making controversies in the Pacific DSM frontier. ...
... Since the discovery of manganese nodules between Tahiti and Hawai'i in the late 19th century, the Pacific Ocean has been at the forefront of global DSM exploration activities (Zalik 2018;Sparenberg 2019). All three types of mineral deposits of commercial interest were first discovered and assessed in the Pacific Ocean (see Table 19.1). ...
... From early works outlining political geographies of the seas (Glassner, 1990;Steinberg, 2001) the literature has branched out to cover a great variety of phenomena, from the role of capitalism in the enclosure of the oceans (Campling & Colás, 2017;Fairbanks, Campbell, Boucquey, & St. Martin, 2018;Mansfield, 2004), their legal geographies (Constantinou & Hadjimichael, 2020;Ntona & Schröder, 2020), zoning practices (Jay, 2013;Ryan, 2015) such as Marine Spatial Planning and conservation territories (Ardron, Gjerde, Pullen, & Tilot, 2008;Gray, 2018), and spatial ontologies in ocean governance more generally (Lambach, 2021;Peters, 2020b). These approaches have also been applied to the deep seabed (Zalik, 2018;Ranganathan, 2019). ...
... The 2007 'Russian flag' episode is an obvious example of this but 'freedom of navigation' naval exercises fulfill the same purpose (Wirth, 2018). Second, through the extraction of marine and subsoil resources, such as fish, hydrocarbons, marine genetic resources etc., which is closely enmeshed with technological development and changes oceanic spaces (Zalik, 2018;Schlüter et al., 2020). ...
... 13-14). Nowadays, investments in deep sea mining are growing rapidly and discussions about its regulation have reached an unprecedented intensity (Ranganathan, 2019;Zalik, 2018). A large-scale project to fully map the global seabed by 2030 was launched a few years ago (Mayer et al., 2018). ...
How did the Arctic seabed become a political space despite its almost complete inaccessibility to humans? While we can explain the causes of this in geopolitical and economic terms, theorizing the process is more difficult. This article argues that spatial constructions of the Arctic seabed emerge from the interaction among human actors, technologies, and the material environment. This interaction generates representations which are then fed into the overall process of spatializing the seabed. By highlighting the role of technology, this paper offers a way of relating human agency and materiality in the construction of oceanic space. The case study of bathymetry in the ongoing disputes over the Arctic continental shelf illustrates how technological and scientific advancements are embedded into global politics and themselves cause evolutions in the spatial construction of the seabed.
... In that way, these transfer points illuminate the transversal bordering capabilities of actors by which space (or more specifically territories) can be (re)defined and (b)ordered. Because our analysis serves a theoretical purpose of exploring the extent to which marine scaping in a transboundary context bears reflexivity, our case studies are based on a desk study of available literature, policy documents, secondary sources (particularly Zalik (2015Zalik ( , 2018 for the ISA case), and additional information publicly available (online) such as news items, blogs, and position statements. ...
... The humanscape of this arrangement consists of the political and regulatory institutional context as defined by UNCLOS and the claims of mining companies. The mindscape of seabed mining, i.e., the way actors define seabed mining, and the knowledge needed revolves around competing approaches to maritime law: "the deep seabed is divergently represented as null versus common property" (Zalik 2018;2). "Terra nullius" or no-man's land refers to the position that everybody has free access to and can claim the marine resources in ABNJ. ...
... For example, Lockheed Martin has an exploration permit for the CCZ 7 , holding only rights under the US law. The USA, an observer in ISA, has not ratified UNCLOS, but allows, also through agreements with other states, US companies to capitalize on their first mover advantage (Zalik 2018). Moreover, greater access to capital as well as proprietary data keep these companies in pole position (Ibid.). ...
Ecological interconnectivity and institutional ambiguity in the marine realm complicate planning of economic activities and balancing socio-economic interests with conservation, especially in transboundary contexts like regional and high seas. Transboundary Marine Spatial Planning (TMSP) calls for enhanced reflexivity in governance arrangements, referring to coalitions of actors who are capable to jointly (re-) examine courses of action and to (re-) invent steering practices outside the dominant political system. TMSP is founded in processes of deliberation and learning, wherein (new) information is a key resource for a broad range of actors. In this article, we argue that TMSP needs to be conceptualized as a process of marine scaping because that puts informational processes at the center of analysis of TMSP. As such, reflexive TMSP is different from conventional notions about MSP where state actors are deemed to be in the lead. By illustrating our argument with two examples from the tropical, high seas we show how the centrality of information puts also the capabilities of other than state actors to the fore. We assessed governance by the International Seabed Authority (ISA), in case of defining an environmental plan for the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, as form of structural reflectiveness. The International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) demonstrated a form of performative reflectiveness in its spatial measures for protecting tropical tunas. Arrangements tasked with reconciling spatial conflicts between marine environment and use in transboundary areas should be (re) designed in a way that emphasizes the interplay between reflexivity and information.
... To a certain degree, it was this temporary truce that allowed for a multilateral compromise between spatially mobile and immobile capital investments to be broached and for the eventual adoption of UNCLOS (Steinberg, 1999: 415). Currently, this arrangement finds itself under heightened pressure, as an ensemble of new extractive technologies, geopolitical scuffles over rare earth minerals and the rise of a mineral dependent 'green economy' have revived seabed mining endeavours both within EEZs and in the high seas (Mallin, 2018;Zalik, 2018). As Zalik (2018: 5) posits, current efforts to transform the high seas management regime are "product[s] of a neo-mercantilist drive on the part of state and affiliated fractions of capital to claim potentially valuable resources perceived as globally scarce." ...
... Within their jurisdiction, states are allowed to install industrial facilities, operate large machinery and extract resources as long as no avoidable impediments on navigational freedoms arise. In spite of an initial rush, DSM has been held back by the high investments required to develop technologies that allow mining at these depths at a profitable rate of return (see especially Zalik, 2018). The recent spike in demand for 'green economy' inventories, such as copper for wind turbines, lithium for car batteries, as well as rare earths that feed into the production of laptops, cell phones and the next generation of ballistic missiles, has revived the DSM race of the 1970s (Teske et al., 2016;Sanderson, 2018). ...
... Beyond resources under state jurisdiction, the prospects for success of the DSM sector has long been frustrated by the obscure legal regime for mining concessions in the so-called 'Area', administrated under the formal auspices of the International Seabed Authority (ISA) (Fritz, 2015;Zalik, 2018). Following the edict "All rights in the resources of the Area are vested in mankind as a whole, on whose behalf the Authority shall act"mineral resources beyond national jurisdiction were designated to be distributed fairly, mining technologies to be shared with 'developing countries', and disputes resolved through binding legal instruments (UNCLOS, 1982). ...
Over the course of the past decade, the political economy of global ocean space has entered into a process of significant transformation. In this context, multilateral, corporate and financial attention dedicated to so-called 'blue growth' and 'blue economy' schemes has been extraordinary; consequentially spawning critical inquiries into the origins and motives behind these initiatives. Offering different analytical interpretations of contemporary blue economy politics, as well as their origins and effects, geographers have entered this debate with a strong focus on institutional discourses and policy agendas. Building on critical political economy of ocean space literatures, this paper emphasises instead the role of capital in appropriating and re-organising the seas according to its own needs. Our primary aim is to elucidate the territorial-economic tensions and geopolitical antagonisms that drive current trends by historicising the emergence of the Blue Economy Paradigm (BEP). The paper shows that a Procrustean political geography of ocean space increasingly poses a barrier to capitalist expansion.
... Hence, critical scholars have deployed concepts such as "grabbing" and "new enclosures" to illuminate the dispossession of prior users of land such as peasants. Even though land grabs have received disproportionate attention in the literature, the ocean (the other component of the terraqueous) was not immune to the scramble for natural resources by global capital as part of the spatio-temporal fi xes of these crises of capitalism (Ayelazuno and Ovadia 2022;Barbesgaard 2018;Bennett et al. 2015;Franco et al. 2014;Zalik 2015Zalik , 2018. ...
... At the height of the land grabs post-2007-2008 global economic crises, Ghana was one of the key targeted African countries for land grabs (Cotula et al. 2014). Following the fi nding of oil in 2007 in the Atlantic Ocean, specifi cally, the Gulf of Guinea, Ghana's coastal communities also experienced "ocean grabbing" ( Ayelazuno and Ovadia 2022;Bennett et al. 2015;Franco et al. 2014;Zalik 2015Zalik , 2018. Mining-driven land grabs in Ghana preceded the post-2007-2008 land grabs by more than a decade. ...
Situated in the context of the land and ocean grabs in Ghana post-2007-2008 global economic crises, this article argues that the country is experiencing "primitive accumulation" without capitalist industrialization. I draw on the insights of agrarian political economy to argue that this has created cheap laborers without industrial capital to exploit. Th e corollary of this is the creation of additional "relative surplus population", worsening the country's (un)employment crisis. However, this "relative surplus population" is not marginal to global capitalist accumulation and exploitation; on the contrary, it is important to them. Th e article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Ghanaian communities to document the voices of the dispossessed and semi-proletarianized about their experiences with the crisis of (re)production inflicted on them by global capitalism.
... The 2007 'Russian flag' episode is an obvious example of this but 'freedom of navigation' naval exercises fulfill the same purpose (Wirth, 2018). Second, through the extraction of marine and subsoil resources, such as fish, hydrocarbons, marine genetic resources etc., which is closely enmeshed with technological development and changes oceanic spaces (Schlüter et al., 2020;Zalik, 2018). • Finally, connecting means linking and relating spaces to each other. ...
... 140 UNCLOS). Nowadays, investments in deep sea mining are growing rapidly and discussions about its regulation have reached an unprecedented intensity (Ranganathan, 2019; Zalik, 2018). A large-scale project to fully map the global seabed by 2030 was launched a few years ago (Mayer et al., 2018). ...
How did the Arctic seabed become a political space despite its almost complete inaccessibility to humans? While we can explain the causes of this in geopolitical and economic terms, theorizing the process is more difficult. This article argues that spatial constructions of the Arctic seabed emerge from the interaction among human actors, technologies, and the material environment. This interaction generates representations which are then fed into the overall process of spatializing the seabed. By highlighting the role of technology, this paper offers a way of relating human agency and materiality in the construction of oceanic space. The case study of bathymetry in the ongoing disputes over the Arctic continental shelf illustrates how technological and scientific advancements are embedded into global politics and themselves cause evolutions in the spatial construction of the seabed.
... Although much of this debate concerns either DSM's environmental impact or the legal meaning of key terms such as 'common heritage of mankind' or the 'precautionary approach' (see, for example, Bourrel et al., 2018;Hunter et al., 2018;Jaeckel et al., 2017;Lallier & Maes, 2016;Levin et al., 2016;Niner et al., 2018;Ovesen et al., 2018;Tunnicliffe et al., 2018;Van Dover et al., 2011), critical social scientists have sought to locate the turn to the seabed as a source of mineral resources within broader political economic trends. Recent work has shown how the seabed becomes ripe for exploration through its construction as a 'frontier' (see Zalik, 2018), or how seabed mining zones are constituted through complex data politics (see Sammler, 2016), rendering decision-making far from neutral or apolitical. Work has also aimed to take seriously the spatial dimensions of the seabed (see Carver et al. 2020;Childs 2020a;Peters, 2020) as deep, voluminous, 4D, analyzing in turn what the character of the seabed means for how it is used (or potentially used). ...
... These ontological questions are not purely philosophical. As other authors have shown, raising ontological questions is vital for practical policy work, particularly in marine environments (see, Dixon, 2016 andNeilson &São Marcos, 2019), and with specific reference to seabed mining (see, Zalik, 2018 andCarver et al., 2020). By mining our knowledge of taken-for-granted ontologies, we can open space for more critical understandings that enhance how we go about formulating and enacting policy for DSM. ...
In spite of a proliferation of academic and policy-oriented interest in deep sea mining (DSM), this paper argues that two underlying questions remain underexplored. The first relates to what exactly the seabed is; the second to who the stakeholders are. It is argued that a greater interrogation of how the seabed is defined and understood, and a deeper consideration of how stakeholders are identified and the politics of their inclusion, is crucial to the enactment of policy and planning techniques. Through the analysis of current regulations to govern DSM in both national and international jurisdictions, this paper critically examines these seemingly banal but vital questions in different contexts. It is contended that most regulations are ‘fuzzy’ when it comes to addressing these questions, with the result that different understandings of the seabed and the implications of mining are ignored and that who stakeholders are and how they are defined causes many relevant voices to be unheard. It is argued, therefore, that it is imperative to address these often-overlooked questions directly in order to inform future seabed policy and governance.
... Participation by the Enterprise, and by developing countries wanting to mine, would be enabled by technology transfer from developed countries. CHP, or more specifically the potential to operationalize it through the Enterprise, was 'watered down' in the 1994 Implementing Agreement for Part XI (the Area) of UNCLOS (hereafter the 1994 Implementing Agreement, UN, 1994), which introduced market logic overall and, among other things, stipulated that technology transfer would occur at 'fair market price' (Steinberg, 2001;Okereke, 2008;Zalik, 2018;Collins and French, 2020). Nevertheless, CHP is still mobilized in general, and in on-going ISA and BBNJ treaty negotiations, to "contest the hegemony of traditional sea powers" and their preference for FOS (Vadrot et al., 2021, 19; see section 4). ...
... In fisheries, Campling (2010, 2017) have detailed the complex ways in which the interests of the fishing industry are represented in UN Regional Fisheries Management Organizations. In the ISA, representatives of the largest investor states form one of the five voting groups (chambers) on the ISA Council and the 1994 Implementing Agreement included provisions to protect the interests of 'pioneer investors' (Zalik, 2018;Collins and French, 2020). More generally, the private sector is positioned as critical to oceans governance by groups like the World Ocean Council, an 'ocean industry leadership alliance', but also by UN agencies concerned with reducing "the regulatory, financial, and even scientific burden of ocean governance shouldered by state and UN agencies" (Silver et al., 2015, 146) through innovations like public-private partnerships. ...
The United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (Ocean Decade) bring increased attention to various aspects of ocean governance, including equity. One of the Ocean Decade's identified challenges is to develop a sustainable and equitable ocean economy, but questions arise about how to conceptualize the multiple dimensions of equity in an ocean context. These questions become more complex as activities move away from coastal ecosystems and communities into off-shore Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), where ocean resources are recognized simultaneously as unowned/open access and as common heritage. In this paper, we mobilize the Earth System Governance analytics of ‘architecture’ and ‘agency’, to reflect on the possibilities for equity in ABNJ. Motivated by the general attention to equity in UN initiatives like the SDGs and the Ocean Decade, we describe current UN architecture for ocean governance, including principles that might support equity. Existing UN architecture focuses on distributional equity among nation states, with less attention to recognitional or procedural equity. State actors have most agency, while non-state actors can exercise some via broad UN declarations and through mechanisms like ‘major groups.’ We use on-going negotiations in the International Seabed Authority on rules for mineral exploitation and in the Intergovernmental Conference on an international legally binding instrument under UNCLOS on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction to illustrate how existing architecture shapes possibilities for equity in ABNJ. As new governance possibilities are imagined, attending to existing architecture and agency can help avoid further entrenching existing power imbalances and unwittingly reproducing or exacerbating inequities.
... Unter den Global Commons werden im Rahmen dieses Artikels physische Räume außerhalb staatlicher Souveränität verstanden (Buck 1998 (Brando, et al. 2019). Am ehesten wird die Konstruiertheit und die Dynamik internationaler Regulierungsmechanismen noch in Arbeiten reflektiert, die sich mit der Governance einzelner Domänen befassen: den Ozeanen (Mansfield 2004;Pontecorvo 1988), dem Meeresboden (Zacher/McConnell 1990;Zalik 2018) (Soroos 1991;Vogler 2001). Territorialisierung wird hier am häufigsten unter dem Stichwort der Enclosure vor allem in Bezug auf die Ozeane (Ball 1996;McCormack 2017) und die Arktis (Dodds 2010;Schwartz 2019) diskutiert. ...
... Das Beispiel Meeresbodenressourcen ist eine gute Illustration hierfür: Als in den 1970er Jahren die Weltmarktpreise für bestimmte, dort aufzufindende Metalle hoch waren, war auch das Interesse am Tiefseebergbau sehr groß (Traavik 1974). Nachdem diese Projekte während einer Preisflaute eingestellt worden waren, bekam der Tiefseebergbau mit der Erholung der Preise ab dem Jahrtausendwechsel wieder Zulauf (Zalik 2018). Drittens hängt Territorialisierung von der Verfügbarkeit der dafür notwendigen Technologien ab (Vogler 2012). ...
Global Commons sind Gemeingüter in Räumen jenseits nationalstaatlicher Kontrolle: die Ozeane und der Meeresboden, die Atmosphäre, der Weltraum und die Polregionen. Während die Forschung zur Regulierung von Global Commons vor allem deren Effektivität zur nachhaltigen Ressourcennutzung untersucht, ist wenig über ihre Entstehung oder Nicht-Entstehung sowie ihre Dynamiken bekannt. In diesem Aufsatz argumentieren wir, dass die Territorialisierung von Global Commons, also ihre Parzellierung und Aufteilung unter staatliche Kontrolle, heute anders abläuft als in früherer Zeit. Während es lange üblich war, dass durch Territorialisierung souveräne Ansprüche auf Commons-Räume entstanden, vollzog sich Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts ein Normwandel, so dass Territorialisierung seither fast ausschließlich auf funktionale Kontrollrechte begrenzt wird. Ein Vergleich von 13 Fällen in den fünf Domänen der Global Commons deutet an, dass Prozesse der De- und Reterritorialisierung bestehender Arrangements durch technologischen Wandel und die daraus entstehenden Nutzungskonflikte und sicherheitspolitischen Rivalitäten angestoßen werden.
... With prospecting (the identification of sites for potential Deep Sea Mining (DSM)) already established, explorations (investigations into these sites and their capacity for mining operations) well underway, and exploitation (the physical removal of deep seabed resources) arguably not far behind, DSM in the 'Area' (as it is commonly known) is likely to become a significant domain of mineral extraction in future [35]. DSM has been described as the new 'frontier' space of global capitalism [36] within a 'blue' economy moment [37]. ...
... B 375: 20190458 corporations-with the research, science and technology capabilities to enable such activities. This makes DSM a complex territory see [35,36,[38][39][40]. Given that the 'Area' is legally protected as 'common heritage', the ISA requires 'that interested entities, if not a Member State itself, must first obtain sponsorship from a state that is party to UNCLOS' to enable it to carry out such activities ( [38], p. 681). ...
This paper offers a conceptual contribution to understanding ocean governance and the management of spaces for the protection of marine biodiversity, organization of extractive industries, the arrangement of global shipping and other ‘blue-economy’ uses. Rather than focus on one type of management technique (such as a Marine Protected Area (MPA) or example of Marine Spatial Planning), or a site- or species-specific case study of governance, this paper offers a theoretical tracking of the uncharted territories of governance that foreground ocean management approaches. The literature on ocean governance and management techniques predominantly derive from scientific disciplines (which provide the basis for planning) and policy-related social science fields, leaving a lacuna in more critical discussions of ways of knowing and understanding the world that drive it. The paper argues the need to critically understand the ontologies (the regimes of what we believe exists) and geophilosophies (the geographically informed modes of thinking) of territory that underscore ocean management to make sense of its past successes and failures, its present functioning and its future directions. This paper argues that without critical consideration of the kinds of thinking—the ontologies and geophilosophies—that drive ocean management, it will lack the transformative potential many hope it will achieve for sustainable development.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Integrative research perspectives on marine conservation’.
... The location matters for both symbolic and practical reasons. The choice of Jamaica for the seat of the International Seabed Authority (ISA), established by UNCLOS, for example, reflected the importance of the developing states' New International Economic Order agenda and the Common Heritage of Mankind principle [13]. Potential host states are often keenly aware of the benefits of hosting, which include international prestige and visibility as well as local jobs and economic activity [14]. ...
... The continuous capitalistic expansion in the commons, from the depths of the high seas to the celestial bodies of outerspace, drives the identification of potential deposits. The contested positions of these new frontiers beyond state jurisdictions are in part defined by the geopolitics of proprietary data and political economy of finance (Zalik 2018) and reverberate Hawkins and Parrott's (2021) call for caution against the "export of capitalism and its environmental imprint off-Earth." The re-creation of Eurocentric dynamics of enclosure and disimagination are not only powerful narratives of off-Earth privatized exploration but are also disrupted by ethnofuturism ideals departing from the (mostly) Western and Sino-centric "'traditional' conceptions of extraterrestrial extractivism" (Jones 2021b; see also Quan 2017). ...
... 11 Various authors have already questioned the political and ecological consequences of DSM (Zalik 2018;Childs 2020;Le Meur et al. 2018;Bainton et al. 2021;Tilot et al. 2021), but only very few have taken an ethnographic approach (Childs 2019;Filer, Gabriel 2018). Especially interesting is the work of the geographer John Childs who showed (in his multi-site research conducted at Nautilus Minerals' headquarters in Brisbane and its national office in Papua New Guinea, as well as with manufacturers of underwater vehicles in the UK) that it is precisely the materiality of the sea that is exploited by the corporation to legitimize the Solwara 1 DSM project (Papa New Guinea) as sustainable (Childs 2019). ...
Today, the extraction of minerals from the seabed is increasingly seen as the new frontier in the push to transition to a “low-carbon economy” that requires larger quantities of metals. It therefore becomes anthropologically salient to ask: what are the political, epistemological, ecological, and economic consequences of a mining future that promises to be bound up with autonomous machines and increasingly sophisticated technologies? How does engagement with mining change when extraction takes place in the deep sea? How does our relationship with the ocean change? In this article I go virtually ‘on board’ DSM, as a first theoretical step towards designing innovative research on this emergent sector.
... While there is an established 'grabbing' literature examining the economic and political power disparities that can exist within foreign land and freshwater acquisitions between wealthier resource-seeking states and less wealthy resource-abundant states [26][27][28], these potential disparities have yet to be critically explored with substantive empirical data in relation to purposeful DWF activities [7]. They have, however, been extensively examined in the general fishing and broader ocean resource use literature [29,30], such as on community conservation [31], seabed mining [32] and small-scale fishing [33]. One reason that DWF has not been examined through a grabbing lens, despite the clear potential for illegal or contract fishing to be intertwined with neocolonial and neoimperial interests, is that high-resolution data on fishing effort has been historically scarce before the systematic collection of Automatic Identification System (AIS) data to extract fishing effort by Global Fishing Watch [17,34]. ...
Distant water fishing occurs worldwide as foreign fleets fish in the exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of other states. We test the hypothesis that host state governance performance is an explanatory factor in observed distant water fishing effort using Global Fishing Watch’s fishing effort data obtained from vessels’ automatic identification system (AIS). We examine the explanatory power of the World Governance Indicators (WGI), Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, and biophysical fisheries productivity indicators (temperature, oxygen, salinity, nutrients, and primary productivity) on fishing effort from foreign fleets across the four most common gear types (fixed gear, longliners, trawlers, and tuna purse seiners). Our models include both host EEZ fishery productivity indicators and governance indicators with R² values of 0.97 for longlining, 0.95 trawling, 0.95 for fixed gear and 0.82 for tuna purse seiners. Although a lack of good governance may enable illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing, the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has enabled the legal establishment of foreign fishing contracts. However, it is unlikely that fishing contracts are decoupled from economic and political negotiations on other issues. We argue that it is worthwhile to consider the term “fish grabbing”, meaning wealthier and politically more powerful states consciously seek to profit from fishing in the waters of often weaker states through developing legal fishing contracts.
... Grabbing or enclosure has the same connotation for the ocean as land: denying prior users access to and user/ property rights over them and their resources to reproduce themselves (Barbesgaard, 2018(Barbesgaard, , 2019Bennett et al., 2015, p. 62). Both land and the ocean are appropriated by global capital through (and for) strikingly similar processes and purposes: processes of extraction such as mining and exploration/production minerals and petroleum and through processes of fishing and farming to produce food and meat proteins (Campling & Colás, 2021;Zalik, 2009Zalik, , 2015Zalik, , 2018. ize ocean-control grabbing as the 'dispossession or appropriation of use, control or access to ocean space or resources from prior resource users, rights holders or inhabitants' (p. ...
Ghana's petroleum industry is located several nautical miles offshore in the Western Region of the country. Yet, the mechanisms and processes of production and transportation of crude petroleum are accompanied by the dispossessing of the adjoining coastal communities of their means of (re)production: both on the ocean and on land. Although the insights of agrarian political economy have been deployed fruitfully to analyse land grabs in Africa, similar efforts are rare when it comes to ocean grabs. With reference to the new development thinking on the ocean economy—or ‘blue economy’—as the new frontier of resource‐based industrialization in Africa, we re‐frame the agrarian question and apply it to the offshore petroleum industry, expanding agrarian political‐economic theory of industrialization beyond its traditional confines of land and agriculture. Our paper makes two main theoretical contributions. First, it contributes to efforts in agrarian political economy to incorporate the ocean and fisheries. Second, we contribute a fresh theoretical framework for analysing offshore petroleum industries and their potential to contribute to industrialization in Africa.
... Building on the term 'land grabbing', 'ocean grabbing' was initially defined as 'capturing of control by powerful economic actors of crucial decision-making around fisheries, including the power to decide how and for what purposes marine resources are used, conserved and managed now and in the future' and as the 'processes and dynamics that are negatively affecting the people and communities whose way of life, cultural identity and livelihoods depend on their involvement in small-scale fishing and closely related activities' (TNI 2014, 3). Following the debates of fisher movements and their allies, the term was also adopted in academic discussions; either to explore the evolution of the concept as done by Bennett, Govan, and Satterfield (2015), to criticize blue growth initiatives (Barbesgaard 2018), or to study the politics of different marine sectors such as seabed mining (Zalik 2015(Zalik , 2018, fisheries in East Africa (Doerr 2016) or in New Brunswick (Knott and Neis 2017), and real estate and touristic development and conservation initiatives in the Colombian Caribbean (Pérez 2019), among others. ...
Fisher people and their communities around the world have been key social actors in seafood production and they are still feeding the world with about two-thirds of the catches destined for direct human consumption. However, they are subjected to a wide range of injustices due to coastal and offshore investment projects and the inequalities embedded in the global capitalist marine economy. These injustices are manifested through socio-environmental conflicts, which have been studied and mapped in the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) together with other social actors’ resistances. This article examines 120 fisher folk conflicts that have been identified, documented and mapped in the EJAtlas, while proposing a Blue Justice framework to understand their underlying causes and how fisher people confront such injustices. As a grounded theoretical approach emerging from the scrutiny of fisher resistances and building on environmental justice, critical marine sociology and political economy literatures, the Blue Justice framework proposed here focuses on three dimensions: (i) material and biophysical dimension, (ii) spatial justice, and (iii) autonomy and sovereignty. In adopting this framework, this analysis reveals the blue layers of environmental justice by uncovering both the causes of conflicts faced by fisher communities and their political agency.
... the lack of transparency attributable to the closed meetings of the LTC (Johnson et al., 2016, pp. 78-79;Willaert, 2020;Zalik, 2018). ...
The deep sea is home to the greatest habitat on earth and comprises 70% of the global ocean volume. Furthermore, it hosts vast deposits of mineral resources. To administer these resources and potential mining activities, the United Nations Convention on the Law and the Sea regime was developed by the international state community during the second half of the 20th century. Established under this convention, the International Seabed Authority is an international organization dedicated to administering the mineral resources in the seabed in areas beyond national jurisdiction. Besides the analysis and synthesis of specific articles of the United Nations Convention on the Law and the Sea as well as of applicable academic literature, the thesis analyzes structural issues of and recent developments at the International Seabed Authority as regards the influence of particular subsidiary organs within the Authority as well as on member states with the support of insights provided by interviewed experts and a conducted survey. The analysis is partly based on the Managers of Global Change Project (MANUS) led by Bernd Siebenhüner and Frank Biermann, conducted during the 2000s. Both the presented literature regarding the decision-making structure within the ISA and the data collected via the interviews and the survey showed that specific organs of the International Seabed Authority as well as particular member states wield enormous influence. The causes for this influence are discussed and different forms and areas of influence are categorized according to a framework that was developed by the MANUS project.
... These dimensions and centuries of acquaintance with the interconnectivity of its ecosystems underlay traditional and indigenous knowledge, and constitute keystones to holistic forms of marine resource management mainly linked to fisheries including protected areas and species. Discoveries of rich metal deposits (polymetallic nodules, rare earths, metal-rich muds, cobalt rich ferro-manganese crusts, and hydrosulfide deposits) on the deep seabed (Hein and Koschinsky, 2014) have led to commercial interest from all over the world, as seabed mineral extraction is increasingly regarded as a suitable alternative to land-based mining and might be necessary to satisfy the increasing metal demand in the global shift toward sustainable energy (Zalik, 2018;Havice and Zalik, 2019). Conflicting ambitions of conservation and exploitation are especially tangible in the most biodiversity rich Pacific region (Dahl and Carew-Reid, 1985;D'Arcy, 2006;Petterson, 2008;Trichet and Leblic, 2008;Vieux et al., 2008;Kingsford et al., 2009;Cardno Limited, 2016), which covers an area of about 30 million km 2 within the world's largest ocean and, on the one hand, is seen as the most promising area for seabed mineral extraction in the near future (Figure 1). ...
In many of the Pacific Islands, local communities have long-held cultural and spiritual attachments to the sea, in particular to species and specific marine areas, processes, habitats, islands, and natural seabed formations. Traditional knowledge, customary marine management approaches and integrated relationships between biodiversity, ecosystems and local communities promote conservation and ensure that marine benefits are reaped in a holistic, sustainable and equitable manner. However, the interaction between local traditional knowledge, contemporary scientific approaches to marine resource management and specific regulatory frameworks has often been challenging. To some extent, the value of community practices and customary law, which have provided an incentive for regional cooperation and coordination around ocean governance, is acknowledged in several legal systems in the Pacific and a number of regional and international instruments, but this important connection can be further enhanced. In this article we present a science-based overview of the marine habitats that would be affected by deep seabed mining (DSM) along with an analysis of some traditional dimensions and cultural/societal aspects of marine resource management. We then assess whether the applicable legal frameworks at different levels attach sufficient importance to these traditional dimensions and to the human and societal aspects of seabed (mineral) resource management in the region. On the basis of this analysis, we identify best practices and formulate recommendations with regard to the current regulatory frameworks and seabed resource management approaches. Indeed, the policies and practices developed in the Pacific could well serve as a suitable model elsewhere to reconcile commercial, ecological, cultural and social values within the context of deep sea mineral exploitation in addition to sustaining the Human Well-being and Sustainable Livelihoods (HWSL) of the Pacific communities and the health of the Global Ocean.
... Recent studies point to a concern that mineral exploitation will begin without establishing appropriate governance structures to manage environmental risks (Craik, 2020;Ardron et al., 2018;Cuyvers et al., 2018;Thompson et al., 2018;Zalik, 2018;Jaeckel et al., 2016Jaeckel et al., , 2017. These studies largely focus on governance in international waters, and pre-date recent regulatory developments at the ISA (2019). ...
Progress towards deep sea mining (DSM) is driven by projected demands for metals and the desire for economic development. DSM remains controversial, with some political leaders calling for a moratorium on DSM pending further research into its impacts. This paper highlights the need for governance architectures that are tailored to DSM. We conceptualise DSM as a type of complex orebody, which encompasses the breadth of environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks that make a mineral source complex. Applying a spatial overlay approach, we show that there are significant data gaps in understanding the ESG risks of DSM. Such uncertainties are compounded by fact that there are no extant commercial DSM projects to function as a precedent-either in terms of project design, or the impacts of design on environment and people. Examining the legislation of the Cook Islands and International Seabed Authority, we demonstrate how regulators are defaulting to terrestrial mining governance architectures, which cannot be meaningfully implemented until a fuller understanding of the ESG risk landscape is developed. We argue that DSM be approached as a distinct extractive industry type, and governed with its unique features in frame.
... Nicht zuletzt gibt es umfangreiche Literaturen zu den einzelnen Domänen: den Ozeanen (Mansfield 2004, Pontecorvo 1988, dem Meeresboden (Zacher/McConnell 1990, Zalik 2018, dem Weltraum und dem Mond (Craven 2019, Weeden/Chow 2012, den Polen (Min 2017, Albert/Wehrmann 2015 sowie der Atmosphäre (Soroos 1991, Vogler 2001 ...
Global Commons sind Gemeingüter in Räumen jenseits nationalstaatlicher Kontrolle: die Ozeane und der Meeresboden, die Atmosphäre, der Weltraum und die Polregionen. Während die Forschung zu den Global Commons vor allem deren Effektivität zur nachhaltigen Nutzung von Ressourcen erforscht, ist wenig über ihre Entstehung, Nicht-Entstehung und Dynamiken bekannt. Dieses Papier argumentiert erstens, dass die Territorialisierung von Global Commons, also ihre Parzellierung und Aufteilung unter staatliche Kontrolle, heute anders abläuft als in früherer Zeit. Während es lange üblich war, dass durch Territorialisierung souveräne Ansprüche auf ehemalige Allmenden entstand, vollzog sich seit dem Ende des Zweiten Weltkriegs ein Normwandel, so dass Territorialisierung seither weitgehend auf funktionale Kontrollrechte beschränkt wird. Zweitens zeigt sich, dass die Entstehung und Territorialisierung von Global Commons pfadabhängige Prozesse sind und sich Veränderungen daher episodisch und nicht kontinuierlich ergeben. Dies wird anhand eines Vergleichs von 13 Fällen in den fünf Domänen der Global Commons gezeigt.
... The burgeoning literatures on 'ocean grabbing' and 'blue grabbing' take a more critical approach to this discourse. These concepts are mostly applied to spaces inside national waters (Bennett et al. 2015, Foley/Mather 2019 although, for instance, Zalik (2018) uses them to discuss the politics of undersea mining. ...
The governance of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) is shifting. As governance institutions expand and thicken, we see a multiplication of functional spaces governing conservation, the sustainable use of marine resources, and safety at sea in ABNJ. In contrast to enclosure approaches, which focus on economic exploitation in near-shore areas, this paper uses the concept of functional territorialization to survey and describe the many ways how the high seas are being territorialized. It argues that this drive to territorialize the high seas is not primarily due to a particular effectiveness of area-based management tools but is driven by deeper-lying trends towards the managerialization or ‘taming’ of maritime spaces to make them safe for human activity and exploitation. The future of the oceans will be a polycentric patchwork of functional governance areas.
... 54 При этом МОМД выражает молчаливое согласие с тем, что претензии США на два участка являются легитимными. 55 Более того, США могут вновь заявить свои права на участок "USA-2" площадью 112500 км 2 , остающийся свободным. ...
... Currently, the Global South-with the exception of China-is generally no longer seen as challenging the North's security of supply. Nevertheless, North-South tensions and the associated conflicts of interest still influence the regulatory debates within the ISA today (Zalik, 2018). ...
Of late, there has been a rise in interest in deep-sea minerals such as manganese nodules. Commercial mining operations to extract such minerals may commence soon. However, deep-sea mining projects were already underway in the 1960s and in an advanced stage of development by the 1970s, only to be shelved again in the 1980s. This paper examines a half a century of history of deep-sea mining and discusses how changing political, legal, economic, and socio-cultural policy frameworks contributed to its rise, fall, and eventual rebirth. In doing so, it is shown that the path towards commercial mining is less straightforward or inevitable than it may seem to current proponents and critics of deep-sea mining. This paper also uses the case of manganese nodules to illustrate how mineral concentrations can gain, lose, and regain their status of a resource depending on social, political, legal, and economic factors. The “becoming” of resources is an open-ended, reversible and sometimes incomplete process.
Despite the increasing number of space launches, growth of the commercial space sector, signing of the Artemis Accords, maturation of space mining technologies, the emergence of a regulatory environment through domestic legislation, and a comprehensive body of international law, an intergovernmental governing authority has yet to be established to manage mining activities on the Moon. We developed a Lunar Mining Code and mapping tool to regulate and manage prospecting and exploration activities for water ice at the Moon’s poles. The Lunar Mining Code is composed of a notification system to manage prospecting, a contract system for issuing exploration licenses to allotted areas on the Moon, and best mining practices and principles to promote equal access and safeguard the lunar environment.
Recognising the seabed as a space of contested Rights and Title requires the Canadian State to fundamentally change its approach to the territories of Indigenous peoples. In 2023, the Canadian State declared an effective
moratorium on deep-sea mining within its jurisdiction. While the importance of establishing environmental regulations has been recognised, discussion of access and Indigenous Rights and Title relating to the seafloor is lacking. This is despite challenges to State claims of sovereignty over, and activities pertaining to the seabed being increasingly invoked in the Canadian courts. Indigenous Rights over the seabed complicate State expressions of sovereignty over stolen and unceded marine scapes. However, the State’s definitions of “land” over which Rights are conferred—and the placement of the burden of proof onto Indigenous peoples—only serves to replicate colonial and racial logics of Indigenous peoples as static, both geographically and temporally. In contrast the State affords itself the potential to be flexible, including in how it mobilises the ocean’s geo-physical characteristics, as new and emerging industries shape discussions of the seabed as a site of extraction. Instead of extending policies and practices that have been extensively critiqued in relation to terrestrial land, the current moratorium offers an opportunity to reconsider how the State operates with regards to the marine space. Engagement with these questions is necessary, lest the dispossession and theft that occur on land and offshore are continued and repeated.
Access link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jnOA3pILhosW
After the Second World War, the dissolution of European empires and emergence of 'new states' in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere necessitated large-scale structural changes in international legal order. In Completing Humanity, Umut Özsu recounts the history of the struggle to transform international law during the twentieth century's last major wave of decolonization. Commencing in 1960, with the General Assembly's landmark decolonization resolution, and concluding in 1982, with the close of the third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea and the onset of the Latin American debt crisis, the book examines the work of elite international lawyers from newly independent states alongside that of international law specialists from 'First World' and socialist states. A study in modifications to legal theory and doctrine over time, it documents and reassesses post-1945 decolonization from the standpoint of the 'Third World' and the jurists who elaborated and defended its interests.
This article explores the politics behind the promise of ‘blue growth’. Reframing it as a ‘blue fix’, we argue that the blue growth discourse facilitates new opportunities for capital accumulation, while claiming that this accumulation is compatible with social and ecological aims as well. The blue fix is made up of three underlying sub-fixes. First of all, the conservation fix quenches the social thirst for action in the face of climate change. Here we see how protecting marine areas can be an important part of mitigating climate change, but in practice, gains at the national level are overshadowed by the ongoing expansion of offshore drilling for oil and gas. Second, the protein fix satisfies the growing global demand for healthy food and nutrition through the expansion of capital-intensive large-scale aquaculture, while ignoring the negative socio-ecological impacts, which effectively squeeze small-scale capture fishing out, while industrial capture fishing remains well positioned to expand into as well as supply industrial aquaculture with fish feed from pelagic fish. And third, an energy fix offers a burst of wind energy and a splash of new deep-sea minerals without disturbing the familiar and persistent foundation of oil and gas. This dimension of the blue fix emphasizes the transition to wind and solar energy, but meanwhile the deep sea mining for minerals required by these new technologies launches us into unknown ecological territories with little understood consequences. The synergy of these three elements brought together in a reframing of ocean politics manifests as a balancing act to frame blue growth as ‘sustainable’ and in everyone’s interest, which we critically analyze and discuss in this article.
This chapter deploys assemblage theory and thinking to bring together a unique set of insights on the seabed ranging from the ecological, to legal, practice to theoretical. It does so with a particular aim in mind: to integrate debates pertinent to understanding the frontier space of the sea floor. Whilst there are increasing calls for interdisciplinary integration in the marine sciences, combining the natural and social sciences research on the space of the seabed and its potential for mining tends to be siloed with work addressing component parts of such possible processes: ecosystem and ecosystem service aspects, legal dimensions, and geopolitical aspects, to name but a few. Whilst these contributions touch upon intersecting issues (society and environment; law and economics, and so on) they remained centered on particular disciplinary and scientific offerings to understanding the seabed and prospect of seabed mining. This chapter offers a thoroughly ‘joined up’ approach, which presents a prism through which to better understand the issues at stake in venturing to the new vertical frontiers of ocean extraction.
In this article, I address the omission of the ocean or the aqua in geo-political scholarship and public debate. My argument is motivated by the public descriptions of Putin’s invasion and war in Ukraine and the lack of attention to the oceanic geopolitics of deep sea mining. Descriptions of Putin’s attack reproduce old terrestrial arguments about the role of geography in figuring national identity and destiny. On the contrary, I posit that the war in Ukraine is focused on capturing control of the oceanic circulation of resources. Deep sea mining is framed as a green response to defossilization of energy and the economy, and centres on mining minerals on the sea floor for the ‘EV revolution’. I argue that these two events or crises can be understood through a conjunctural framework. However, this involves reworking cultural studies’ usual understanding of conjunctural analysis. Following the work of Ben Highmore and others, this means deepening the geopolitical, historical and material scales involved in the disjunctures that hold together simultaneously yet separately the invasion of Ukraine and the legal framing of mining the deep seas through the UN Convention of the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) and the International Seabed Authority (ISA). Such an analysis involves narrating the clashing of what Timothy Clarke calls the derangement of temporal scales of the Anthropocene if we are to figure ‘what happening now’.
L’Autorité Internationale des Fonds Marins (AIFM) est mandatée pour réguler le développement de l’industrie minière des grands fonds marins au-delà des juridictions nationales. Elle développe des politiques environnementales dès ses débuts en 1996. Mais celles-ci demeurent liées à son mandat minier. La négociation internationale environnementale qui se déroule de 2007 à 2012 avec des acteurs externes met en lumière des enjeux entre sciences/politiques, experts/décisionnaires ou développement industriel/environnement. Elle se développe autour d’« Aires Marines Protégées » (AMP), des instruments de conservations par zonage à la popularité croissante. Leur visée étant d’exclure les activités minières de vastes zones de haute mer, le projet semble aller à l’encontre du mandat extractif de l’organisation internationale. Mais le format de la négociation va les rendre compatible avec le projet de laisser ouvert un horizon « durable » pour les mines des grands fonds marins.
After years of informal efforts, the parties to UNCLOS are negotiating an international legally binding instrument to address governance gaps that have impeded attempts to conserve biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Though these discussions were initiated in response to concerns about biodiversity, states have used them to advance competing claims regarding rights of acces¬¬s, ownership, and control of ocean spaces and resources. This paper examines how states have discussed ocean space in negotiations regarding area-based management tools (ABMTs) and marine genetic resources (MGRs) at the first three intergovernmental conferences regarding biodiversity in ABNJ. ABMTs, which have become widespread in governing ocean space for conservation, are premised on an ontological framing that ocean space can be divided by geographical boundaries into territories for management. MGRs, on the other hand, are newly recognized governance objects that cross existing spatial boundaries: between areas of national and international jurisdiction, between the seafloor and water column, and between the ocean and the lab. Through their mobility, MGRs reveal how territorial forms of governance over material resources intersect with other forms of exclusion, control, and rights-based institutions, suggesting the need to develop creative management regimes that go beyond territorial approaches.
How does the digitization of the ocean reconfigure capitalist, colonial, and environmental relations? What analytic tools allow us to trace their intersecting dynamics? These are the central questions that we take up through an examination of smart oceans governance along the west coast of Canada, where the state is developing new institutional partnerships in order to manage the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure across unceded Indigenous lands and waters. In this context, one laden with environmental risks and resurgent anti‐colonial politics, state actors are implicating smart oceans governance in efforts to harmonise capitalist growth with sustainability mandates and the “recognition” of Indigenous self‐determination. Our analysis combines environmental state theory, critical indigenous studies, and human geographies of the ocean and draws on interviews, Access to Information requests, scientific studies, and policy reports. Our findings suggest that smart oceans governance poses novel risks to Indigenous peoples and their distinctive “seascape epistemologies.” At the same time, we observe in this medium new limits to the state's ability to consolidate settler colonial authority and extend possessive colonial entitlements to Indigenous lands and waters. First Nations are also engaging with smart oceans governance in ways that assert “Indigenous data sovereignty”, help chart their own political and territorial ambitions, and carve out meaningful spaces of Indigenous marine stewardship.
This chapter analyses the institutionalization of Deep Seabed Mining (DSM) governance arrangements and starts by discussing the governance context and practice of deep seabed mining, followed by examining the role of the International Seabed Authority, the role of governmental and non-governmental actors in the exploration and exploitation of marine resources from the seabed and the way this is organized. The process of (liquid) institutionalization of DSM is illustrated by the example of the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ), in the Pacific Ocean. The analysis showed both stabilization, in which the existing historical power position of pioneer firms and sponsoring states is defended against change, supported by the neo-liberal and neo-mercantilist discourses; and, structuration, related to the development of the mining code and the development of the Environmental Management Plan for the CCZ. The analysis indicates characteristics of Type II and Type III liquid institutionalization within the example of DSM.KeywordsDeep Seabed Mining; International Seabed Authority; Clarion Clipperton Zone; Sponsoring states; Pioneer firms; Mining Code; The Area; Common Heritage of Mankind; The Enterprise
Early in the 1960s, the seafloor began to emerge as a new territory, over which imaginaries of limitless natural resources, to be explored and exploited, were projected. The oil industry became a patron for marine geosciences, whereas coastal governments hastened to ground in geophysical data their sovereign claims over underwater regions. This thesis inquiries through which mechanisms the patrons’ motivations to explore the seafloor drove the production of knowledge about it; while it explores how the seafloor emerged as a territory, shaped by concerns and priorities deriving from decolonization. Focusing on France’s oil industry and political stances interested in exploiting marine resources, I analyze the institutional and social mechanisms through which commercial motivations were articulated with marine geosciences. A singular network, weaved by a political elite, grew connecting government instances, extractive industries, and scientific laboratories, creating academic-industrial interplays to explore the seafloor in which trade secrecy dissolved. This research suggests a continuum in practices, infrastructures, and state actors from the decolonization of France’s oil-producing territories to the seafloor, in the quest for new productive grounds. In this context, geological knowledge from the seafloor increasingly became a crucial asset for the French government, which could mobilize it to negotiate international relations and foster national prestige. This thesis conveys that economic motivations to explore the seafloor and the oil industry’s patronage shall not be overlooked in our understanding of the oceans’ history.
Commercial deep sea mining (DSM) stands at a threshold as both national and global legal regimes seek to move beyond exploration of the seabed towards its exploitation. As an emerging political issue that takes place in complex geographies that are not always accounted for by science, deep-sea mining demands critical attention. It is against this background that this paper aims to highlight work that foregrounds these different geographies and actors that together shape the politics of DSM. As it emerges as a political reality in the Anthropocene, it asks what geographies are implicated and why do they matter? It highlights scholarship that has explored both the human and more-than-human dimensions and relations of DSM and argues for a broad range of thinking that is appropriate to the complex deep-sea environments being targeted for extraction.
While borders traverse both land and sea, current research has mostly concentrated on issues concerning terrestrial borders. Simultaneously, a new body of scholarship has shown how the seemingly boundless oceans are in actuality subject to a variety of bordering forces. As such, we review current research on maritime borders in geography and other related disciplines in three categories: oceanic resource extraction and environmental conservation, volume geography and wet ontology, and concepts of ocean frontiers and voluminous states. Conclusively, we propose land-ocean inter-bordering, multiple materialities, and mobile state power as three future issues to respond to the rapid-changing maritime borders.
Traditional knowledge, customary marine management approaches and integrated relationships between biodiversity, ecosystems and local communities promote conservation and ensure that marine benefits are reaped in a holistic, sustainable and equitable manner as fostered by contemporary ocean governance. However, the interaction between traditional knowledge, the present scientific approach to marine resource management and specific regulatory frameworks has often been challenging. To a certain extent, the value of community practices and customary rules, which has provided an incentive for regional cooperation and coordination, is acknowledged in several legal systems of the Pacific Island States and a number of regional and international instruments, but this important interconnectivity can certainly be perfected.
This article provides a critical evaluation of the International Seabed Authority’s (ISA) management of Deep Sea Mining (DSM) activities in the undersea area lying beyond sovereign territory. By juxtaposing the ISA’s nascent regulatory framework against one of the world’s most successful resource management regimes in Norway, we can clearly see how the ISA is unable to pursue the sort of strategic ownership that is necessary to secure the rents generated from these natural resources; rents which rightfully belong to the common heritage of mankind. In particular, we suggest that the ISA should: secure a better balance of institutional power across its policy, regulatory and operational roles; develop a more explicit policy for protecting the public’s interest (both current and future generations) as the owner of these resources; play a more active role in assembling and managing the access it allocates to these resources; and begin the discussion about how best to manage the wealth generated by these resources in a way that can ensure its just distribution.
This Handbook provides an essential guide to the study of resources and their role in socioenvironmental change. With original contributions from more than 60 authors with expertise in a wide range of resource types and world regions, it offers a toolkit of conceptual and methodological approaches for documenting, analyzing, and reimagining resources and the worlds with which they are entangled.
The volume has an introduction and four thematic sections. The introductory chapter outlines key trajectories for thinking critically with and about resources. Chapters in Section I, “(Un)Knowing Resources,” offer distinct epistemological entry points and approaches for studying resources. Chapters in Section II, “(Un)Knowing Resource Systems,” examine the components and logics of the capitalist systems through which resources are made, circulated, consumed, and disposed of, while chapters in Section III, “Doing Critical Resource Geography: Methods, Advocacy, and Teaching,” focus on the practices of critical resource scholarship, exploring the opportunities and challenges of carrying out engaged forms of research and pedagogy. Chapters in Section IV, “Resource-Making/World-Making,” use case studies to illustrate how things are made into resources and how these processes of resource-making transform socio-environmental life.
This vibrant and diverse critical resource scholarship provides an indispensable reference point for researchers, students, and practitioners interested in understanding how resources matter to the world and to the systems, conflicts, and debates that make and remake it.
This article analyzes the first controversies and the decision-making process (1982-1989) that triggered the way in which seabed’s mineral exploitation zones are distributed today among countries. It starts with Reagan’s administration refusal to sign the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. It then analyzes how UN legal framework is institutionalized albeit this posture. It hypothesizes that unofficial diplomatic and private-sector negotiations produce lock-in effects, which consolidate a path dependence towards the UN framework. The article draws from United Nations field research and from the institution’s archival records.
The project to exploit deep mineral resources, which dates back to the 1960s, came back to the forefront in the 2000s, in a context of a race for raw materials and the rapid growth of emerging economies, particularly China. Deep-sea mining constitutes a new economic and technological frontier for mining firms and transnational capital, while Pacific Island Countries and Territories are striving to anticipate this encounter by strengthening their sovereign powers and regional cooperation. At stake for indigenous peoples and customary authorities is the cognitive and normative representation of oceanic spaces as an integral part of their universe and life world that feeds specific assertions of "non-Westphalian" sovereignty. However, the realization of the deep-sea mining potential remains slow to emerge. This article proposes to explore this still largely virtual mining frontier through the policies and mechanisms put in place in the French territories of the Pacific, with an emphasis on the case of Wallis and Futuna. It will examine and analyze the effects induced by the encounter between French policy, Oceanian responses and the virtuality of deep-sea mining, particularly from the point of view of the overseas territories' relations to the State and to information, between mistrust, rumor and controversies. The article will show the key role of uncertainty (moral, institutional and ontological) in how social actors understand and negotiate the issues raised by deep-sea mining prospects.
As technologies of ocean exploitation emerged during the late 1960s, science policy and diplomacy were formed in response to anticipated capabilities that did not match the realities of extracting deep‐sea minerals and of resource exploitation in the deep ocean at the time. Promoters of ocean exploitation in the late 1960s envisaged wonders such as rare mineral extraction and the stationing of divers in underwater habitats from which they would operate seabed machinery not connected to the turbulent surface waters. Their promises coincided with others' fears that nuclear weaponry would be placed on the seabed. Those who lacked the technological capability to extract minerals from the seabed also had concerns that other nations would exploit their resources. Scientific imaginaries caused uncertainty in the international community—especially in the “Global South.” The UN called the “Law of the Sea” conferences to mediate emerging geopolitical tensions caused by these imaginaries of exploitation of ocean resources. These conferences became a site where lawmakers projected futures rather than merely responding to past or present dilemmas. Diplomats' negotiations, with their basis in anticipation of the future uses of science and technology, reveal the role of scientific imaginaries within complex negotiations. Here, we see the impact of the distinction (or blurring) of the real and the imagined on the balance of relations between Global North and South increasing global imbalances of resources and power. This article's analysis of such scientific diplomacy provides a valuable example of the power of scientific imaginaries to have a global impact.
This article explores the politics behind the promise of ‘blue growth’. Reframing it as a ‘blue fix’, we argue that the blue growth discourse facilitates new opportunities for capital accumulation, while claiming that this accumulation is compatible with social and ecological aims as well. The blue fix is made up of three underlying sub-fixes. First of all, the conservation fix quenches the social thirst for action in the face of climate change. Here we see how protecting marine areas can be an important part of mitigating climate change, but in practice, gains at the national level are overshadowed by the ongoing expansion of offshore drilling for oil and gas. Second, the protein fix satisfies the growing global demand for healthy food and nutrition through the expansion of capital-intensive large-scale aquaculture, while ignoring the negative socio-ecological impacts, which effectively squeeze small-scale capture fishing out, while industrial capture fishing remains well positioned to expand into as well as supply industrial aquaculture with fish feed from pelagic fish. And third, an energy fix offers a burst of wind energy and a splash of new deep-sea minerals without disturbing the familiar and persistent foundation of oil and gas. This dimension of the blue fix emphasizes the transition to wind and solar energy, but meanwhile the deep sea mining for minerals required by these new technologies launches us into unknown ecological territories with little understood consequences. The synergy of these three elements brought together in a reframing of ocean politics manifests as a balancing act to frame blue growth as ‘sustainable’ and in everyone’s interest, which we critically analyze and discuss in this article.
The Research Cluster Human Security & Resource Governance is maintaining since 2018 a bibliography that collects academic works analyzing resource conflicts and resource governance. The bibliography is comprised of academic books, journal articles, working papers and policy reports. The goal of the bibliography is to provide a useful sample of starting points for research and investigations on resource conflicts and resource governance. The bibliography is “work in progress” and will be regularly updated.
National and international deliberations about whether the global mining industry should be permitted to use the earth's seas as mine waste dumps are not decided on the basis of independent scientific data from past or existing sites. Nor is a critical lack of scientific knowledge about the deep sea environment and about the long‐term consequences of marine dumping triggering the precautionary principle for proposed projects. Rather, governments make decisions on submarine tailings disposal (STD) on a mine‐by‐mine basis, in a context of contested scientific claims, considerable political and economic pressure, and, sometimes, contravening or amending existing legislation to allow a project to proceed. These decisions provoke complex social processes that commonly involve: local opposition; political conflict; regulatory and legal challenges; powerful industry lobbies; international financial institutions, and resource‐hungry states. STD projects engender controversy in developing countries, such as Papua New Guinea (Divecha 2002; Shearman 2002a), Indonesia (Edinger 2012; Glynn 2002) and the Philippines (Coumans et al. 2002; Coumans and MaCEC 2002), but also in Canada (Cultural Survival 1982) and Norway (Kvassness et al. 2009). This paper examines cases drawn from the Philippines, Canada and Papua New Guinea to illustrate common themes that arise in conflicts surrounding STD mine projects.
The dynamic and unfolding relationship between the oceans and humans underwrites a general narrative of oceans in ‘crisis’ and the need for new governance and regulatory frameworks to attend to it. As concerns surrounding marine space have proliferated, sovereignty, territory and property in the oceans remain imprecise and subject to controversy, presenting challenges (and opportunities) for oceans governance. This special issue employs the concept of ocean frontiers as a pivot into these concerns because of the eroding, but still frequent, portrayal of the oceans as a planetary space separate from humans and because the concept offers entry points for navigating the unfolding dimensions of ocean conservation and exploitation. Deducing from the eight contributions from the special issue, we develop four inter‐related arguments. First, while ocean frontiers pre‐exist the epistemological, jurisdictional and commodification categories that we conceptualize in this editorial introduction, we find that these categories, which may be understood as intersecting in ocean regimes, play central roles in closing the spatial and socially‐constituted ocean frontier, bringing it closer to human purview. Second, the materiality of oceans – their mobile and volumetric elements ‐ influences all of these emerging and intersecting oceanic processes. Third, contributing authors have developed innovative methodological approaches to the study of the oceans, revealing oceans not as ‘siteless’, but multi‐sited, and demonstrating that the social sciences are well suited methodologically to bring unfolding ocean processes into view. Last but not least, drawing from the insights set out by the contributors, we argue for ongoing interdisciplinary social (and natural) science research on the oceans as they and human‐ocean relations unfold in a period of dramatic change.
Potential risks of supply shortages for critical metals including rare-earth elements and yttrium (REY) have spurred great interest in commercial mining of deep-sea mineral resources. Deep-sea mud containing over 5,000 ppm total REY content was discovered in the western North Pacific Ocean near Minamitorishima Island, Japan, in 2013. This REY-rich mud has great potential as a rare-earth metal resource because of the enormous amount available and its advantageous mineralogical features. Here, we estimated the resource amount in REY-rich mud with Geographical Information System software and established a mineral processing procedure to greatly enhance its economic value. The resource amount was estimated to be 1.2 Mt of rare-earth oxide for the most promising area (105 km2 × 0-10 mbsf), which accounts for 62, 47, 32, and 56 years of annual global demand for Y, Eu, Tb, and Dy, respectively. Moreover, using a hydrocyclone separator enabled us to recover selectively biogenic calcium phosphate grains, which have high REY content (up to 22,000 ppm) and constitute the coarser domain in the grain-size distribution. The enormous resource amount and the effectiveness of the mineral processing are strong indicators that this new REY resource could be exploited in the near future.
There is increasing interest in mining minerals on the seabed, including seafloor massive sulfide deposits that form at hydrothermal vents. The International Seabed Authority is currently drafting a Mining Code, including environmental regulations, for polymetallic sulfides and other mineral exploitation on the seabed in the area beyond national jurisdictions. This paper summarizes 1) the ecological vulnerability of active vent ecosystems and aspects of this vulnerability that remain subject to conjecture, 2) evidence for limited mineral resource opportunity at active vents, 3) non-extractive values of active vent ecosystems, 4) precedents and international obligations for protection of hydrothermal vents, and 5) obligations of the International Seabed Authority under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea for protection of the marine environment from the impacts of mining. Heterogeneity of active vent ecosystems makes it extremely challenging to identify "representative" systems for any regional, area-based management approach to conservation. Protection of active vent ecosystems from mining impacts (direct and indirect) would set aside only a small fraction of the international seabed and its mineral resources, would contribute to international obligations for marine conservation, would have non-ex-tractive benefits, and would be a precautionary approach.
In the governance of natural resources, transparency has been linked to improved accountability, as well as enforceability, compliance, sustainability, and ultimately more equitable outcomes. Here, good practices in transparency relevant to the emerging governance of deep-seabed mining in the Area beyond national jurisdiction are identified and compared with current practices of the International Seabed Authority (ISA). The analysis found six areas of good transparency practice that could improve the accountability of deep-seabed mining: i) access to information; ii) reporting; iii) quality assurance; iv) compliance information / accreditation; v) public participation; and vi) ability to review / appeal decisions. The ISA has in some instances adopted progressive practices regarding its rules, regulations, and procedures (e.g. including the precautionary approach). However, the results here show that overall the ISA will need to consider improvements in each of the six categories above, in order to reflect contemporary best transparency practices, as well as meeting historical expectations embodied in the principle of the 'common heritage of mankind'. This would involve a revision of its rules and procedures. The ongoing review and drafting of the ISA's deep-seabed mining exploitation regulations offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve upon the current situation. Findings from this analysis are summarised in 18 recommendations, including publication of annual reports submitted by contractors, publication of annual financial statements, development of a transparency policy, compliance reporting, and dedicated access to Committee meetings.
As climate change makes the Arctic a region of key political interest, so questions of sovereignty are once more drawing international attention. The promise of new sources of mineral wealth and energy, and of new transportation routes, has seen countries expand their sovereignty claims. Increasingly, interested parties from both within and beyond the region, including states, indigenous groups, corporate organizations, and NGOs and are pursuing their visions for the Arctic. What form of political organization should prevail? Contesting the Arctic provides a map of potential governance options for the Arctic and addresses and evaluates the ways in which Arctic stakeholders throughout the region are seeking to pursue them.
Interest in mining the deep seabed is not new; however, recent technological advances and increasing global demand for metals and rare-earth elements may make it economically viable in the near future ( 1 ). Since 2001, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) has granted 26 contracts (18 in the last 4 years) to explore for minerals on the deep seabed, encompassing ∼1 million km2 in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans in areas beyond national jurisdiction ( 2 ). However, as fragile habitat structures and extremely slow recovery rates leave diverse deep-sea communities vulnerable to physical disturbances such as those caused by mining ( 3 ), the current regulatory framework could be improved. We offer recommendations to support the application of a precautionary approach when the ISA meets later this July.
The global rush for land has provoked diverse policy responses from host countries. While some governments are facilitating ‘land grabs’ within their borders, others have restricted land acquisitions by foreigners. Drawing from the Brazilian case, I argue that such restrictive regulations may be limited in their effectiveness because they apply a state-centric geopolitical logic to a threat that is largely de-territorialized and financialized. The Brazilian government reacted to fears about land grabbing by reinstating a legal framework from the 1970s that focuses on the threat that foreigners pose to national sovereignty. This measure dampened international enthusiasm for Brazilian land, but it also triggered companies to begin searching for legal ways to get around the restrictions, often by exploiting the mismatch between the fungibility of global capital and the rigidity of the foreign/domestic dichotomy. I suggest that the semi-permeability of the new restrictions may present an opportunity for the Brazilian government to balance its conflicting commitments to smallholder farmers and export-oriented agribusiness. Regulations focused on foreign threats may be politically effective even as they impose an outdated conceptual framework on a far more complex reality.
In this article, we track a relatively new term in global environmental governance: “blue economy.” Analyzing preparatory documentation and data collected at the 2012 UN Conference on Sustainable Development (i.e., Rio + 20), we show how the term entered into use and how it was articulated within four competing discourses regarding human-ocean relations: (a) oceans as natural capital, (b) oceans as good business, (c) oceans as integral to Pacific Small Island Developing States, and (d) oceans as small-scale fisheries livelihoods. Blue economy was consistently invoked to connect oceans with Rio + 20’s “green economy” theme; however, different actors worked to further define the term in ways that prioritized particular oceans problems, solutions, and participants. It is not clear whether blue economy will eventually be understood singularly or as the domain of a particular actor or discourse. We explore possibilities as well as discuss discourse in global environmental governance as powerful and precarious.
This article analyses the phenomenon of rising powers from a historical materialist perspective. It (1) elaborates the key concepts of historical structures of world order, state–society complexes and transnational class formation, and (2) applies them to Brazil, Russia, India, China and other so-called ‘rising powers’ to account for the nature and extent of the challenge they pose to the existing institutions of global governance. A double argument is advanced: first, the integration of rising powers into the historical structure of global capitalism has reduced traditional sources of great power conflict, and made rising powers heavily dependent on the existing institutional framework established by the liberal West. This facilitates their integration into the existing governance order. However, within the limits of the existing order, two factors lend a heartland–contender cleavage to the politics of global governance: the rising powers’ relatively more statist, less market-driven forms of state, and their subsequent failure to be integrated into emergent transnational capitalist class structures. Consequently, it is not the global governance order itself, but its most liberal features, that are contested by rising powers. The result is that, in contrast to realist pessimism and liberal optimism, the rise of new powers is leading to a hybrid governance order that is both transnationally integrated and less liberal.
Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the era of imperialism, the character, scale, pace, orientation, and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North-South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises, and the role of new configurations of power and resistance in global governance institutions. The essays in this collection contribute to identifying land grabbing as an important and urgent topic for theoretical and empirical investigations to deepen our understanding of contemporary globalization and governance.
International studies routinely consign agri-food relations to the analytical margins, despite the substantive historical impact of the agri-food frontiers and provisioning on the structuring of the interstate system. As a case in point, current restructuring of the food regime and its global political-economic coordinates is expressed through the process of 'land grabbing'. Here, the crisis of the WTO-centered corporate food regime, which has neoliberalized Southern agriculture while sustaining Northern agro-food subsidies, is manifest in a new form of mercantilism of commandeering offshore land for supplies of food, feed, and fuel. This article examines the content and implications of this new 'security mercantilism', which both affirms and contradicts a neoliberal order, anticipating a shift in international relations around resource grabbing.
In the late 1970s, scientists discovered something new under the sea: sea-floor hydrothermal vents, supporting complex biotic communities under conditions previously thought inimical to life. While the vents themselves were predicted by the theory of plate tectonics, their extent and geochemical significance, and the ecosystems associated with them, were a profound surprise. Perhaps for this reason, their discovery has been portrayed as an example of the serendipitous nature of scientific research, a triumph of curiosity-driven investigation. Yet the US scientific presence in the deep-sea environment was anything but the result of chance. In the period following World War II, the US Navy actively promoted research in the deep-sea environment in support of pro- and anti-submarine warfare. Central to this was the development of deep-sea technologies to aid underwater acoustic surveillance of Soviet submarines, and it was this technology that enabled the discovery of the sea-floor vents. The US political desire to monitor the deep ocean provided both justification for substantial expenditures for deep-oceanographic research, and motivation for oceanographers to build expensive experimental technologies and use them in creative ways. In this sense, the Cold War political context was highly productive of scientific advance. Yet, at the same time, the scientific topics that gained the attention of the oceanographers came into focus through the crosshairs of national security. Like a lens, military pertinence brought certain subjects into clear sight while others remained on the edges of the field of view.
In this theoretically original work, two distinguished authors explore the mutual interdependence of states and firms throughout the world. They show how global structural changes - in finance, technology, knowledge and politics - often impel governments to seek the help and cooperation of managers of multinational enterprises. Yet, as Professors Stopford and Strange demonstrate, this is constrained by each country's economic resources, its social structures and its political history. Based on grass-roots research into the experience of over 50 multinationals and more than 100 investment projects in three developing countries- Brazil, Malaysia and Kenya - the authors develop a matrix of agendas. They present the impact on projects of the multiple factors affecting the bargaining relationships between the government and the foreign firm at different times and in a variety of economic sectors. In conclusion they offer some guidelines for actions to both governments and firms and some points to future interdisciplinary research.
The development of mineral resources in the deep sea can potentially generate significant economic returns, but also raises governance challenges. The International Seabed Authority (ISA) wrestles with a wide range of issues and complex interactions that may affect not only how the industry develops over time, but also how development will benefit mankind. Two key issues they face are the means for sharing the payments from deep sea mining (DSM), and protecting environmental resources in the deep sea from harmful effects. This article provides an overview of issues for deciding among alternative means of distributing the ISA's share of monetary returns that will be realized as deep sea mineral resources, how they are converted from natural assets into financial assets, and alternative approaches to ensure that exploitation of these resources does not come at the expense of mankind also benefiting from the environmental resources provided by the deep sea.
I. Characteristics of Land-Locked States.- Definitions.- Geographic Characteristics.- Historical Characteristics.- Political Characteristics.- Economic Characteristics.- II. Development of International Law with Respect to Landlocked States.- Developments Through the Nineteenth Century.- The Barcelona Convention and Statute.- Developments After World War II.- The United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea.- The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.- The Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States.- III. Afghanistan.- The Geographic Setting.- Historical and Political Background.- The United States, the Soviet Union and the Afghan Economy.- Afghanistan's Access to the Sea.- Afghanistan, Pakistan and Pushtunistan.- IV. Bolivia.- The Geographic Setting.- Historical and Political Background.- Bolivia's Developing Economy.- Bolivia's Access to the Sea.- Bolivia's Campaign Against Chile.- V. Uganda.- The Geographic Setting.- Historical and Political Background.- The Economy of Uganda and East Africa.- Uganda's Access to the Sea.- East Africa, Zambia and Rhodesia.- VI. Access to the Sea in the Space Age.- Analyses of Case Studies.- Transportation and Development.- Transit, Access and Outlets.- VII. Solutions to the Question of Access to the Sea.- International Law.- Political or Economic Integration.- Regional Cooperation and Development.- Appendices.- I. Convention and Statute on Freedom of Transit, Barcelona, 20 April 1921.- II. Convention on Transit Trade of Land-Locked States.- III. Afghan-Soviet Transit Convention and Agreement.- IV. Afghanistan-Pakistan Transit Agreement, Annex and Protocol.
Although tribal pressures doubtless played a significant part in causing Ugandans to include elements of federalism in the constitution, it is difficult to determine the extent to which federalism exacerbated existing tribal tensions. Certainly the knowledge that political action won federal status for five states had an impact on less successful peoples. Similarly the tendency to base statehood on a tribal foundation caused the emergence of movements aimed at border rectification. Federalism with a tribal basis seems to possess inherently unstable features, for it cannot possibly be adapted to fit the overlapping patterns of Uganda’s ethnic structure. Efforts to build a sense of national unity are especially vital in preventing bitterness, fear and separatist tendencies from hindering the growth of a strong and viable state. 1
The seabed in areas beyond national jurisdiction is the common heritage of mankind (CHM), as declared in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The CHM principle requires not only the sharing of benefits (the subject of a parallel article by the authors) but also the conservation and preservation of natural and biological resources for both present and future generations. The International Seabed Authority, tasked with operationalising the CHM principle in the context of deep-seabed mining, has not yet defined which measures it will take to give effect to environmental aspects of the CHM principle. This article seeks to contribute to the discussion about the operationalization of the CHM principle by specifically examining the environmental dimension of the CHM principle. To this end, the article interprets the CHM principle in the context of sustainable development and discusses a number of potential options the Authority could consider to support the application of the CHM principle. These include: funding scientific research to increase knowledge about the deep ocean for humankind; ensuring public participation in the decision-making process; debating the need for and alternatives to deep-seabed mining; determining conservation targets and levels of harm deemed acceptable; limiting environmental impacts; preserving mineable sites for future generations; compensating humankind for environmental harm; and ensuring enforcement.
The deep sea, defined as those parts of the ocean below 200 meters, is increasingly the site of intensive resource exploitation for fish, minerals, and other uses, yet little thought has been given to effective governance by either scholars or policy-makers. This article provides an overview of existing deep-sea governance arrangements, as well as a description of the barriers to developing a more effective institutional framework, with particular focus on the unique status of the deep sea as part of the common heritage of mankind, the logistical challenges inherent in monitoring resource exploitation in the deep sea, and the lack of available scientific data. We call for greater engagement by political scientists and environmental studies scholars in addressing these challenges and protecting one of Earth’s last true frontiers.
Free access until 3 Aug 2016: http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1TChJ,714MRO-K
The International Seabed Authority (ISA) is currently developing the regulatory framework for commercial-scale mining of minerals on the deep seabed. In this context, the ISA has to balance seabed mining with its mandate to protect and preserve the marine environment from harmful effect caused by mining operations. One potential tool to help strike this balance is adaptive management, which the ISA seeks to incorporate into its future regulatory framework. This article discusses some of the challenges to achieving adaptive management and demonstrates that the current regulatory options make it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve adaptive management.Adaptive management will require procedural mechanisms through which the ISA can adjust environmental standards continuously. This article examines whether the current regulatory framework for mineral exploration provides for such flexibility. Specifically, it discusses four potential ways, including their benefits and shortcomings, in which environmental standards may be adjusted during exploration work. The discussion highlights the current lack of comprehensive mechanisms to adjust environmental standards as one of the barriers to achieving adaptive management. This provides crucial information for the design of the future regulatory framework.
Like territory, terrain is a term that has been tied to its etymological roots on terra. This paper seeks to release terrain as both concept and practice from the terrestrial through an analysis of the Cold War-era case study, Sealab II. This little-studied project, led by the US Navy, sought to establish the feasibility of sustaining life under the sea and in doing so, provides a rich site of analysis through which to explore the notion of terrain that exists in volume, rather than simply on the earth's crust. Within this immersive voluminous framework, the function of the body is also re-examined as both a site that experiences terrain, but also one that became a terrain of sorts during the Sealab experiments. The paper concludes by suggesting that understandings of terrain within geographical scholarship would be enriched were they to push off from the earth's surfaces and argues that there is a need to re-think terrain's relational aspects, re-root it from terra and re-orientate it towards the body.
The polar regions (the Arctic and Antarctic) have enjoyed widespread public attention in recent years, as issues of conservation, sustainability, resource speculation and geopolitical manoeuvring have all garnered considerable international media interest. This critical collection of new and original papers - the first of its kind - offers a comprehensive exploration of these and other topics, consolidating the emergent field of polar geopolitics.
In June 1994, some twelve years after the conclusion of the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, the UN Secretary-General reported to the General Assembly that informal consultations had led to agreements that appeared to have removed the obstacles to general adherence to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.
The impact of the oil and gas industry – paradoxically seen both as a blessing and a curse on socio-economic development – is a question at the heart of the comparative studies in this volume stretching from Northern Europe to the Caucasus, the Gulf of Guinea to Latin America.
Britain’s transformation under Margaret Thatcher into a supposedly post-industrial society orientated towards consumer sovereignty was paid for with revenues from the North Sea oil industry, an industry conveniently out of sight and out of mind for many. Drawing on bottom-up research and theoretical reflection the authors question the political and scientific basis of current international policy that aims to address the problem of resource management through standard Western models of economic governance, institution building and national sovereignty.
This book offers valuable material for students and researchers concerned with politics, inequality and poverty in resource-rich countries. Among the key critical issues the book highlights is the need to understand the politics of social territorialism as a response to exclusionary geopolitics.
Explores the mutual interdependence of states and firms throughout the world, showing how global structural changes - in finance, technology, knowledge and politics - often impel governments to seek the help and co-operation of managers of multinational enterprises. Yet, this is constrained by each country's economic resources, its social structures and its political history. Based on grass-roots research into the experience of over 50 multinationals and more than 100 investment projects in three developing countries - Brazil, Malaysia and Kenya - the authors develop a matrix of agendas. They present the impact on projects of the multiple factors affecting the bargaining relationships between the government and the foreign firm at different times and in a variety of economic sectors. In a conclusion they offer some guidelines for actions to both governments and firms and some points to future interdisciplinary research. -from Publisher
The major countries consuming metals tended historically to be also the major countries producing them. It was in their interest to promote mine development to provide low cost raw materials. Over the past fifty years, the share of global production accounted for by consuming countries has declined and producers and consumers of metals have been slowly moving into separate camps having distinct and differing interests. As a consequence of this, governments of producing countries have become more focused on how to maximise the benefit of metal extraction to their economies rather than on how to supply cheap raw materials; a tendency which has found expression in resource nationalism. Governments of consuming countries have in response become increasingly concerned about the implications of this tendency to their economic development and some countries, most notably China, have adopted robust policies to secure their supplies. Through their actions to influence capital flows within the mining industry and to force metals trade into channels which better serve their national interests (a process characterised here as 'new mercantilism'), metal producing and metal consuming countries are reshaping global supply.
Historians of science have richly documented the interconnections between science and empire in the nineteenth century. These studies primarily begin with Britain, Europe, or the United States at the center and have focused almost entirely on lands far off in the periphery--India or Australia, for instance. The spaces in between have received scant attention. Because use of the ocean in this period was infused with the doctrine of the freedom of the seas, the ocean was constructed as a space amenable to control by any nation that could master its surface and use its resources effectively. Oceans transformed in the mid-nineteenth century from highway to destination, becoming--among other things--the focus of sustained scientific interest for the first time in history. Use of the sea rested on reliable knowledge of the ocean. Particularly significant were the graphical representations of knowledge that could be passed from scientists to publishers to captains or other agents of empire. This process also motivated early government patronage of science and crystallized scientists' rising authority in society. The advance of science, the creation of empire, and the construction of the ocean were mutually sustaining.
For nearly a decade, governments have been discussing the need to improve efforts to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Support for a new international agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) – an Implementing Agreement – on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity in ABNJ has been growing. In June 2012, at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, States agreed to take a decision on the development of an international instrument under UNCLOS before the end of the 69th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), which runs from September 2014 to August 2015. In follow-up to this commitment, it was agreed to consider the “scope, parameters and feasibility” of this instrument. To inform these international discussions, this article highlights some potential options for the content of a new UNCLOS Implementing Agreement. It first reviews the history of UN discussions, and then elaborates on options to address key elements identified as priorities for States in 2011: marine genetic resources, including the sharing of benefits, area-based management tools, including marine protected areas, environmental impact assessments, capacity-building and the transfer of marine technology. It addresses cross-cutting issues such as the governing principles, institutional structure as well as on other critical points such as High Seas fishing and flag State responsibilities. The article concludes with suggestions on possible next steps in order to succeed in the negotiations for an agreement.
In 2012 the International Seabed Authority approved an Environmental Management Plan (EMP) for the Clarion–Clipperton Fracture Zone CCZ in the Eastern Central Pacific. The EMP is a proactive spatial management strategy that anticipates mining of polymetallic nodules and that includes the designation of Areas of Particular Environmental Interest (APEIs). The implementation of the EMP and the sound application of marine spatial planning require sufficient high-quality data to inform decision-makers and draw credible boundaries of protected areas. This paper outlines the development of the EMP in the context of the Authority׳s responsibilities with respect to the protection of the marine environment. The paper further highlights needs for research and data collection and introduces a related EU research project aiming to inform the development of mining guidelines. The authors suggest that the sustainable development of deep sea resources in the CCZ could be considered as a model for blue growth.
In this article, we examine oceans outcomes from the Third United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (or Rio+20) in relation to how ocean problems and solutions were defined and by whom. We highlight the extent to which problem and solution definitions were shared among participants, in relation to three specific issues on the agenda at Rio+20: conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction, small-scale fisheries, and ocean acidification. We find that discussions about each of these issues reflect three challenges recognized as complicating oceans management: mismatches between ecological and governance scale, homogeneity among interest groups advocating for ocean conservation, and increased interest in both protection and exploitation of ocean resources. Overall, we found little evidence of constructive dialogue at Rio+20, where participants focused on advancing predefined positions, and we consider the implications of our analysis for ultimately addressing our three focal issues and for oceans management more generally.
Current theses on the financialization of capitalism postulate a shift from investment in material growth to financial channels, with the implication that the extraction of value from the labour process is no longer the central locus of corporate profitability and that the antagonism between labour and capital in the accumulation process has been displaced by the tension between corporate managers and financial markets. This article challenges both claims of financialization and its political implications. Using an analysis of the oil industry in the US, focusing particularly on layoffs, I argue that, instead of inhibiting material accumulation, financialization signals a change in the form of investment that has led to the intensification of labour and its deepening subsumption under capital, transcending labour exploitation and extending the sovereignty of capital over the life of living labour.
This paper examines the determinants of reserves disclosure (RD) in the Australian extractive industries. Our regression results indicate that RD are positively associated with variables relating to corporate governance, foreign listing, existence of reserves in foreign jurisdictions, pledging of reserves in debt covenants, leverage and external (Big 4) auditor, after controlling for firm size, subindustry, shareholder concentration and development/production stage. Additional regression testing shows that the existence of reserves in foreign jurisdictions is the most important determinant of RD in Australia. This paper contributes to a better understanding of the extent and rationale behind the RD practices of Australian resource firms.
Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control. Agrarian environments have been transformed by processes of de-agrarianization, protected area establishment, urbanization, migration, land reform, resettlement, and re-peasantization. Even the classic agrarian question of how agriculture is influenced by capitalism has been reformulated multiple times at transformative conjunctures in the historical trajectories of these processes, reviving and producing new debates around the importance of land control.The authors in this collection focus primarily on new frontiers of land control and their active creation. These frontiers are sites where authorities, sovereignties, rights, and hegemonies of the recent past have been challenged by new enclosures, property regimes, and territorializations, producing new ‘urban-agrarian-natured’ environments, comprised of new labor and production processes; new actors, subjects, and networks connecting them; and new legal and violent means of challenging previous land controls. Some cases augment analytic tools that had seemed to have timeless applicability with new frameworks, concepts, and theoretical tools.What difference does land control make? These contributions to the debates demonstrate that the answers have been shaped by conflicts, contexts, histories, and agency, as land has been struggled over for livelihoods, revenue production, and power.
This paper (published in two Parts) presents a detailed historical case study of the evolution of the Polaris, Poseidon and Trident weapons programmes, and of the development of the guidance and navigation technologies which are essential to their role in nuclear strategies. Over the last thirty years, these technologies have changed in the direction of greatly increased missile accuracy. Simultaneously, the strategic rationale of these weapons has shifted from that of ultimate retaliatory `counter-city' deterrent (the main perceived role of Polaris) to `counterforce' targeting of opposing silos and command posts (a major role of Trident II). Has technological change been an independent causal factor in this sequence, bringing into being a new strategy, or is technological change the consciously intended product of political will? Part I of this paper presents the historical material as far as the production of Poseidon: Part II will complete the history, and then discuss the various analytical frameworks commonly used to explain such developments.
This paper (the second of two Parts) continues the historical case study of the evolution of Fleet Ballistic Missile guidance and navigation technologies by tracing the origins and development of the Trident system. This comprises a new submarine and two different missiles, Trident I (C4) and Trident II (D5), the latter of which is considered to be optimized for the destruction of `hardened' targets such as missile silos and command posts. It thus appears to mark a significant shift from the ultimate retaliatory `counter-city' deterrent (which was the main perceived role of Polaris).
Is Trident II's technology simply the culmination of inevitable technological change, acting as an independent causal factor that itself determines strategy? Or is technological change the consciously intended product of political will? This historical case is used to discuss various analytical frameworks commonly used to explain such developments — `Technology-out-of-Control'; `Soft Determinism'; `Technologists-out-of-Control'; `Politics-in-Command'; and `Bureaucratic Politics'. It is concluded that the material is most consistent with a `Bureaucratic Politics' perspective, but that this unduly favours one set of `factors' in a `seamless web' where the `technical' cannot readily be distinguished from the `social'. Nevertheless, we feel it possible and useful to try to distinguish patterns in this seamless web, and close with a discussion of one such pattern — the `black-boxing' of technical programmes.
abstractThis article argues that financialization—shorthand for the growing influence of capital markets, their intermediaries, and processes in contemporary economic and political life—generates an analytical opportunity and political economic imperative to move finance into the heart of economic geographic analysis. Drawing upon long-standing concerns about the relatively marginal location of finance in economic geography, we emphasize the integral role of finance in connecting the entangled geographies of the economic to the social, the cultural, and the political. In the wake of various “turns” in the discipline, we develop this integrationist approach to finance in ways that retain political economies of states, markets, and social power in our interpretations of geographically uneven development. In this article, we discuss the plural nature of emergent work on financialization and develop three analytical themes to shape our discussion of financialization. Next, we elaborate our analytical approach by warning against functional, political, and spatial disconnections traced in the literature on the geographies of money. We then explore how financialization is broadening and deepening the array of agents, relations, and sites that require consideration in economic geography and is generating tensions between territorial and relational spatialities of geographic differentiation. Finally, we address the relative dearth of empirical work by examining the financialization of brands that have shaped the evolution of the brewing business and the development of new derivative instruments to hedge against weather risks. We conclude by arguing that our analysis of financialization demonstrates how finance occupies an integral position within economic geographies and reveals some of the sociospatial relations, constructions, and reach of existing and new actors, relations, and sites in shaping the uneven development of financialized contemporary capitalism.
The paper analyzes the prospects for deep seabed mining largely from the legal and political perspectives. It identifies the major players, the forums where the struggles occur, the early assumptions, and then four turning points in the evolution of the current system. The first turning point came when the UN. Convention was adopted, and the United States voted against it. The second turning point came with the deadline for signing the U.N. Convention and qualifying to sponsor a pioneer investor. The third turning point will come when the pioneer investors resolve their overlapping mine site claims and are registered by Prepcom. The fourth turning point will come when Prepcom is able to resolve some of the important outstanding issues. The paper concludes with some recommendations for bringing the institutional machinery and legal framework into such order that deep seabed mining might take place.
The prospects for deep seabed mining in this century appear remote. The U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea was closed for signature on December 10, 1982. As of that date, 155 nation‐states and four entities had signed, but not the United States and some others. Since that time, the United States has endeavored without much success to develop a “Reciprocating States Agreement”; that would legitimate seabed mining with or without the U.N. Convention. On the other hand, the Preparatory Commission has met six times and is making only modest progress without the participation of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Federal Republic of Germany.
The political geography of the sea may be defined as that portion of the Law of the Sea which has a spatial or territorial component, including such matters as the territorial sea and the contiguous zone, the exclusive economic zone, international straits, the regimes of islands and archipelagos, freedom of transit for land-locked states, deep seabed mining and protection and preservation of the marine environment. It also includes larger issues not formally part of the Law of the Sea, such as the links between the Law of the Sea and Antarctica, and military uses of the sea. The new Law of the Sea (hence the new political geography of the sea) is the latest stage in a long evolution traceable to the ancient Greeks and Romans but accelerating since the 17th century. The United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea produced in 1958 four conventions essentially codifying the existing Law of the Sea, including the new continental shelf doctrine. They were followed by the 1965 UN Convention on Transit Trade of Land-locked States. All soon proved inadequate, unacceptable or obsolescent. The Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III, 1973–1982) produced a new single, comprehensive convention embodying nearly all old and new aspects of the Law of the Sea. This and related matters deserve much greater attention from political geographers than they have received thus far.