The conservation-extraction nexus in ocean Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction: Tension or co-constitution?

Recent years have seen a sharp uptick in efforts to expedite resource extraction in, and expand biodiversity conservation to, Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (ABNJ), the ~70% of oceans outside state space. In this symposium piece, we explore the co-constitution of the parallel acceleration of biodiversity conservation and economic exploitation that is unfolding in ways unique to the high seas, but consistent with global patterns wherein this coupling encloses space for capitalist value extraction. These coupled tendencies are part of expanded ocean regulation and, in ABNJ, they form part of state-capital advancement into one of the remaining world frontiers. We explore this extraction-conservation nexus in two contemporary ABNJ negotiations: 1) the Implementing Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction and 2) the International Seabed Authority's development of an exploitation regime for deep-seabed mining in the Area. Our findings build on insights from agrarian political economy and political ecology that establish the co-constitution – rather than incommensurability – of conservation and extractive activities in terrestrial spaces and draw out the arenas of this nexus in the ecologically complex, political-economic grey zone that is the uninhabited (by humans), non-state space of the planet. This work contributes to placing the high seas and the emergent blue economy within the critical scholarship that describes and explores the conservation-extraction nexus and its consequences.