Sovereign Rights to Natural Resources in the Ocean Global Commons – a Critical Appraisal

The paper provides a critical account of the extension of sovereign rights to natural resources into the oceanic global commons and argues that the paradigm of exclusive national rights conflicts with the urgent demands of the environmental protection and with the collective and equitable sharing of natural resources in this domain which is now facing risks of environmental collapse. The paper starts with the reflection on the ocean as a global commons. I show how the ocean has been constructed as an open space defined merely by the variety of resources it can supply to humans and hence available for the extension of various rights and regimes governing the use of these resources. The paper shows that sovereign rights to natural resources have been dominant and most consequential in this process of the construction of the ocean into various maritime zones created for the purpose of the regulation of the appropriation of natural resources. The second part of the paper subjects sovereign resource rights to a critical analysis. I show that sovereign rights to natural resources that have been asserted by states in the ocean space mirror the paradigm of sovereignty over natural resources. This system, I argue, has been designed as a collective right with the aim to fulfil very specific domestic and international goals and functions. However, it has developed into an unconstrained privilege of states which has been practiced in ways that conflict with the demands of justice. The main goal of the paper is to argue that because of the structural and operational deficits, sovereignty over natural resources is a poor model for resource rights in the oceanic global commons. It is unable to prevent the depletion of natural resources and the overall destruction of the fragile marine ecosystems; and to meet other demands of justice for common resource domains – equitable distribution of resources and their collective and sustainable use.