Governing biodiversity: ambiguity and fragmentation in the BBNJ Agreement

Abstract

As the global ecological crisis intensifies, international efforts to conserve biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ) has become increasingly urgent. The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement is widely regarded as a breakthrough in ocean governance, yet it enters a legal and conceptual landscape marked by fragmentation and contested definitions of biodiversity. This article examines how biodiversity is framed, interpreted, and operationalized in the Agreement, as an object of governance, and how this framing may affect its implementation and goals. Combining doctrinal legal analysis, treaty interpretation under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), ethnographic observation of negotiations, and interdisciplinary insights from science and technology studies (STS), political ecology, and the environmental humanities, we trace how biodiversity has been parsed across spatial, legal, and epistemic boundaries to make it governable. For example, the Agreement's focus on Marine Genetic Resources (MGRs) reflects a pragmatic effort to address benefit-sharing, yet it also emphasizes extractive and commercial logics over more systemic or relational understandings of marine life. Key provisions are used to preserve existing institutional arrangements, offering governance stability yet also reinforcing legal fragmentation of biodiversity. While the Agreement embraces strategic ambiguity by not defining biodiversity to enable consensus and adaptability, it also leaves critical questions open about whose knowledge counts and what values guide biodiversity governance. By highlighting both the promise and limitations of the BBNJ framework, the article argues for more inclusive and ecologically attuned approaches to biodiversity governance beyond national jurisdiction.