Ecological Justice for the Deep Seabed Global Commons

The paper outlines the concept of ecological justice for the deep seabed on the basis of the recent developments in the field of global justice and current contestations against impending seabed minerals mining. First, the paper overviews the history of the deep seabed as a distinct global commons. It highlights the unique vision of international distributive justice involved in the CHM principle and traces the attempts to translate it into the institutional regime erected for the seabed and embodied in the ISA. The paper points out the gradual weakening of the redistributive aspirations through the series of compromises and pressures to allow profitable commercial exploitation of seabed minerals. Second, the paper discusses current conflict over the deep sea mining (DSM) – the pressures to start mining and create a facilitating mining regime on the one hand and the contestations against seabed mining on the other hand. Two main strands of the contestation are in conflict – the indigenous calls for the ban on mining activities and calls to adopt precautionary moratoria proposed by some countries and corporations. The paper argues that to arrive at a more successful critical narratives on DSM will require a more pronounced vision of ecological justice for the seabed that helps to reinforce the anti-mining positions. Building on existing critical narratives and the recent work in the field of ecological justice developed to respond to the biodiversity and climate crisis, I outline contours of this vision of ecological justice for the deep seabed.