Abstract
AbstractMeasures related to the COVID-19 pandemic have indefinitely postponed in-person formal international negotiations for a new legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). As a result, online initiatives have emerged to keep informal dialogue ongoing among both state and nonstate actors. To continue our research on the BBNJ process, we adapted our methodology and conducted a survey in May 2020 exploring the impact of COVID-19 on respondents’ BBNJ-related work and communication. This research note identifies online initiatives and communication channels set up to maintain negotiation momentum and examines the challenges and opportunities of digital diplomacy for multilateral environmental agreement making, as well as the study thereof. We discuss future avenues for global environmental politics research and conclude that digital ethnographies provide an entry point to study some of these dynamics but need to be adapted to the study of negotiation settings and the specific context of multilateral environmental diplomacy.
Highlights
Measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic have indefinitely postponed in-person formal international negotiations for a new legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ)
While global environmental politics (GEP) scholarship had started to acknowledge the effects of digital technologies on negotiation dynamics and diplomatic practice, no one was prepared to study the disruptive effects of COVID-19 or to examine current efforts by state and nonstate actors to continue intergovernmental negotiations informally by establishing virtual spaces
Respondents were asked about the kinds of BBNJ-related activities they pursued
Summary
Measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic have indefinitely postponed in-person formal international negotiations for a new legally binding instrument under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ). This research note identifies online initiatives and communication channels set up to maintain negotiation momentum and examines the challenges and opportunities of digital diplomacy for multilateral environmental agreement making, as well as the study thereof. Intergovernmental meetings where global environmental agreements such as the BBNJ Treaty are negotiated have provided scholars of global environmental politics (GEP) with the opportunity to study actors, power constellations, conflicts, influence, and contestation in practice and “on-site” (e.g., Campbell et al 2014; Death 2011; Dimitrov 2014; Hughes and Vadrot 2019; Vadrot 2020). While GEP scholarship had started to acknowledge the effects of digital technologies on negotiation dynamics and diplomatic practice, no one was prepared to study the disruptive effects of COVID-19 or to examine current efforts by state and nonstate actors to continue intergovernmental negotiations informally by establishing virtual spaces. How can we capture the nature of these new spaces, develop suitable methodologies to study them, and attribute meaning to the dynamics we observe?
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