Stewardship Beyond the State: Implications for the Regulation of Marine Genetic Resources in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction

<p dir="ltr">On 4 March 2023, states agreed the text of a binding agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction. Significantly, the BBNJ Agreement refers to the notion of ‘stewardship’ in its Preamble and this may open the way for a more transformative approach to defining our relationships with resources in ABNJ. This reference to stewardship provides the point of departure for the present chapter because it invites reflections on new ways of constructing our relationship with the natural environment and its resources in ABNJ. The draft text has already sparked some academic interest in exploring the meaning and content of stewardship as a legal principle. Recently, Riding has advanced stewardship as a way of thinking about the governance of ABNJ – arguing that it can be used to reconcile the principles of common heritage and freedom of the seas. She defines stewardship as a form of individual and collective responsibility to protect and preserve the environment for present and future generations, based upon principles of responsible use, cooperative management and equity. Riding uses stewardship to synthesise and help frame existing environmental responsibilities. Whilst this has the advantage of grounding it in accepted rules and principles of international law, it does not interrogate more fundamentally how stewardship might be used to reframe our relationship with the natural world. If stewardship is to be of value, it must be more than the sum of its parts. To collapse stewardship back into existing rules and principles begs the question: so what? If those rules and principles exist anyway, then what value does stewardship add? In this chapter, I argue that more needs to be done to understand the content of stewardship. In other words, how can stewardship offer a better way of framing our relationship with the natural world, specifically in areas beyond national jurisdiction? Whilst the broad line of argument in this chapter is that stewardship has the potential to transform how we frame our relationship with the natural world, this entails several steps. Most obviously, we need to consider more carefully the precise meaning of stewardship. Whilst it is novel for the concept to feature in an international agreement, stewardship does have some intellectual heritage and legal significance, so it is essential that we understand what this entails. To this end, I provide a brief typology of stewardship concepts, which shows some of the challenges of using such a value-laden term as stewardship (section III). To address such concerns, I then provide the parameters for an analytical framework for stewardship (section IV), which can be used to explore how stewardship could apply to the governance of ABNJ through the BBNJ Agreement (section V). This provides a guide to how the Agreement might usefully frame our relationship with resources in ABNJ. Before developing the notion of stewardship, I explain why this approach should be considered. In short, stewardship is a relationship that elevates the interests of the beneficiary (eg a person or the environment) above those of the steward (ie the state).</p>