A proposal to establish a new mechanism (its legal status is unclear) within international ocean governance is being debated. France has been the main proponent of the proposed Intergovernmental (or International, this is being discussed) Platform for Ocean Sustainability (IPOS). The EU has funded its development and IPOS currently has ‘official support’ from Chile and China. A number of other states were listed as having expressed varying levels of interest in a recent webinar delivered by the team developing the proposal. This post contextualises how this proposal fits into a wider debate about reforming ocean governance, highlights two potential problems it poses – its depoliticising ambition and its ambiguous relation to what treaties call capacity-building – and suggests ways of addressing these problems.
A Moment for Reform
That the ocean is regulated through a legal and institutional architecture that is fragmented is not a novel observation. It is a longstanding theme of scholarship, both legal and transdisciplinary, and is often recognised in policy-oriented reports, like here and here. A patchwork of United Nations specialized agencies and bodies have subject matter specific mandates with ocean dimensions (IMO, FAO, ISA, DOALAS, IOC-UNESCO, GESAMP, and others). Regional organisations also regulate ocean areas, as do coastal states. The ocean legal regime also lacks a clear institutional link to the climate regime established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the acts of its Conference of the Parties (COP), or to the biodiversity regime constructed around the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the acts of its COP.
While fragmentation may or may not raise practical problems, from the perspective of a problem like human induced climate change, the causes and effects of which span ecosystems and legal mandates and require similarly holistic responses, it can be a problem. It might also be seen as a problem when set against the increasing concentration of corporate power over the ocean’s resources. To take two examples, a handful of corporate behemoths from wealthy states gobble up patents on marine genetic resources that promise drugs and chemical products of almost incalculable value at a quickening pace. Similarly, a small industry of miners jockeys for permission to hoover nuggets dense with manganese, cobalt, nickel, and copper from the deep seabed to satisfy an insatiable global appetite for batteries.
Hence, adding some level of institutional coordination to the international system for ocean governance is not a new idea. Legal scholars, philanthropists, and some governments have called for this for at least a decade. When some of these proposals were made, parts of the ocean governance architecture they envisaged redesigning were in flux, due in particular to the unsettled status of the negotiation of the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement. With the BBNJ Agreement now adopted, a more clarified landscape exists, into which proposals for reform or innovation within ocean governance can fit with more predictability. Although formal institutional connections are still absent, it is clear that the subsidiary institutions that will be established under the BBNJ Agreement when it comes into force will draw on and relate to practice under the UNFCCC and the CBD. These interactions have become more predictable and can be built around.
So it is true that now might be a good moment to push for systemic reform.
Embrace Politicisation
But the IPOS proposal has avoided addressing the above described institutional fragmentation. Instead of being a unifying point within a plethora of legal mandates, IPOS is intended to unify only scientific knowledge. As it has been explained by two groups of co-authors spanning natural and social sciences (here and here), the overarching framing problem from which the idea departs is that of bringing together knowledge currently fragmented in a way that impedes decision making about the ocean. These co-authors repeat a concern commonly heard in UN environmental policy circles, which is that an impediment to political change is the artificial separation of scientific knowledge into ‘research silos’. The ‘silo’ metaphor imagines people isolated in deep but narrow specialist conversations, never looking to either side to speak to others similarly captive to their own too-specialist conversation. A premise of this view is that the necessary knowledge exists, but the challenge is in ‘repackaging knowledge to inform decision-making and influence political agendas’ (quote here). The IPOS co-authors cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) as the main examples that IPOS is intended to replicate.
As it has most recently been described, in the above noted webinar, this model has been altered somewhat. IPOS would now respond to individual requests made by states trying to fulfil a specific ocean related, internationally agreed goal, but having difficulty doing so. It would then convene ad hoc groups of experts in response to each such request. Those groups would produce reports that present alternative policy options to the requesting state. The options presented would be neutral and knowledge based – ‘depoliticised’. Officials and experts of existing UN bodies, scientific institutions and panels, the private sector, and representatives of indigenous peoples, local communities, and youth groups, would all have some degree of oversight over the advice produced by IPOS working groups through different levels of a planned institutional framework. It is possible the IPOS would sit within an existing UN body, perhaps IOC-UNESCO, placing its central coordinating body in Paris, but that is not decided. One of the aims of these changes is to avoid overlapping with work undertaken by existing bodies, or with the IPCC (which did write a stark special report on the ocean and cryosphere specifically) and the World Ocean Assessment.
All of this being said, the basic, motivating problematic does appear to remain the necessity to unify fragmented scientific knowledge and transmit it to decision makers in a clear way. No doubt, there is some truth to the silo metaphor of discipline bound knowledge. But it also risks disguising a problem concerning how power and authority is distributed. Underpinned as it is by an implicit premise that it is knowledge, communicated in a practically understandable way, that will prompt political change at the world level, the fragmented landscape of ocean institutional and legal arrangements described above is the implicit but unaddressed backdrop to the IPOS proposal. It is taken as something that does not in itself pose a problem.
The current IPOS proposal also promises the depoliticisation of contested issues (like seabed mining, on which the IPOS team has focused a pilot reporting project at the request of France). Although only future requests asking how a state might fulfil a specific, internationally agreed goal will be answered, thus excluding a topic like the general merits of seabed mining, it will remain impossible to excise the political dimensions of such requests. Different policy alternatives will inevitably engage political stakes both within domestic politics of requesting states and in their interconnections to international politics. Input from officials of different UN and international bodies, from civil society groups, will also all naturally have political valences.
It might be better were IPOS to make that explicit and embrace a coordinating role in relation to the different interests attached to alternative policy options. One way to achieve that could be to link IPOS to a new governance body with political legitimacy. For example, this might be a panel with an internationally supported mandate to coordinate how UN bodies and regional organizations are or are not facilitating, or where relevant replicating, acts undertaken by states responding to scientific advice tendered by IPOS. This would represent a logical two way exchange of knowledge, from the international community (experts, international officials, private sector, civil society) to requesting states (which will presumably be states with less research capacities); and in a sense back from those states to international level regulatory bodies. In this model the scientific advice of an IPOS working group could be turned back on the system itself, rather than a particular problem being individualised to supposed failures of a requesting state as though that problem had no connection to the broader international system. Bluntly, success might lie in seeking greater politicisation rather than unrealistic depoliticisation.
Is this Capacity-Building?
A second problem with IPOS as currently envisaged is that it is unclear whether or not it would constitute what in treaty language is called ‘capacity-building’. The legal content of capacity-building is vague. It has evolved from ‘institution building’ in international development policy of the 1970s, by the 1990s being more commonly denoted capacity-building. Frequently, ‘capacity-building is used to refer to training people and building organisations – external intervention to mould a particular kind of bureaucratic environment in target States.’ (quote here) It is critiqued as a reflective of a client-benefactor relationship. In practice the distance between capacity-building and conditionality policies is sometimes not so great (I am grateful to Sophie Hölscher for her analysis of this point in the context of the UNFCCC), and its post-1990s evolution could be viewed as well suited to the neo-liberalisation of international development. One response to some critiques has been to use the term ‘capacity-sharing’ to recognise the two-way exchange of knowledge that in fact takes in place through such relationships. The above-suggested change to the IPOS model (attaching a governance panel to allow knowledge to be redirected back into the system more broadly) would reflect such a reality.
The problem that arises in relation to IPOS is that the activities it would undertake could be argued to constitute capacity-building under a number of multilateral treaties. To take one example, without defining capacity-building exhaustively, Annex II of the recently adopted Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement includes an extensive list of activities that capacity-building initiatives under the agreement could include. The proposed activities of IPOS could plausibly fit under paragraphs: (a) The sharing of relevant data, information, knowledge and research, in user friendly formats’ (there follow specific sub-paragraphs that reinforce this interpretation); (b) Information dissemination and awareness-raising’ (and subparagraphs); (d) The development and strengthening of institutional capacity and national regulatory frameworks or mechanisms (and subparagraphs); (e) The development and strengthening of human and financial management resource capabilities and of technical expertise through exchanges, research collaboration, technical support, education and training and the transfer of marine technology’ (and subparagraphs); and (f) The development and sharing of manuals, guidelines and standards’ (and subparagraphs).
There is nothing wrong IPOS being a capacity-building initiative, but it is apparently not intended to be such. It may not be desirable for states to claim to be fulfilling capacity-building obligations under the BBNJ or other agreements by financially supporting IPOS. Although rightly critiqued, capacity-building is an ambiguous legal term that is open to expansive interpretations that could effect significant international economic redistribution. If it was necessary to choose, it might be better were states to operationalise such interpretations over financially supporting IPOS.
Recasting IPOS as being as much about coordinating a fragmented system of ocean governance as about imparting scientific knowledge to individual states (e.g. by building out some form of politically supported governance panel), might also be a way to make the initiative less interpretively plausible as a capacity-building one. Capacity-building is not understood as something that is directed to the international level.
