Sammendrag
This presentation builds on anthropological fieldwork at the United Nations headquarters in New York since 2016 at a series of sessions of the Intergovernmental Conference on Marine Biodiversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), which I have attended as an adviser to the Permanent Mission of Palau to the UN and the UN group of Pacific Small Island Developing States (PSIDS). With postponement during the pandemic, these so-called “BBNJ negotiations” became a drawn-out process, which by late 2022 still has not generated the envisioned result of a “High Seas Treaty”, or, in UN language, “an international legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction”. The twelve PSIDS (plus the Cook Islands) that participate as sovereign states in this arena of global ocean diplomacy see themselves as “Big Ocean States” as between them they hold a large proportion of the Pacific Ocean as their combined Exclusive Economic Zones. Throughout the Intergovernmental Conference, the PSIDS have maintained a strong stand on core topics of contestation referred to in the vernacular of the UN and the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea as “adjacency”, “connectivity”, and “benefit-sharing”, while simultaneously driving a high-profile agenda to include “traditional [Pacific ocean] knowledge” into the draft text. I aim to unpack this process ethnographically, with reference to the challenges for Pacific Island states caused by sea level rise and other effects of climate change, coupled with scenarios of deep sea mining, illegal fishing, and genetic biopiracy.
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