Responsive governance: an approach to the conservation and sustainable use of Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction

Abstract

Marine areas beyond national jurisdiction represent 64% of the total surface area of the oceans and around half of the planet's total surface area. Through their remoteness and vast expanse, they were largely protected from human interference in the past. However, technological advances have removed this protection, exposing this largely unknown ecosystem to unsustainable human activities. To address this emergent problem, the United Nations General Assembly agreed on the legally binding nature of a future agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of BBNJ under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). However, consider a business-as-usual scenario, in which individuals and decision-makers respond to problems rather than working to prevent them, this paper applies the responsive governance lenses to evaluate ten years of Ad Hoc Open-ended Informal Working Group meetings aiming to prove that governance is a problem-driven and it may be tightly connected to the on human perceptions of specific signals and the actors’ relative positions of power. Thus, the chances of having a flexible agreement that will only comply with a partial response to the environmental problem are significant and this will only reduce or mitigate part of the problem but not all. In cases like that, the governance will remain ineffective in some ways.