Neocolonial geopolitics vs. Indigenous-led ocean governance: Who will control the High Seas Treaty’s future?
Original framing: “Race to host High Seas Treaty HQ heats up as Chile reaffirms bid” — Climate Home News
Women fishers in Senegal and the Philippines—who make up 50% of small-scale fishing labor but own less than 5% of fishing licenses—are entirely absent from High Seas Treaty discussions. In Chile, *pescadoras artesanales* (artisanal fishers) report harassment when defending their territories from industrial trawlers, yet their testimonies are excluded from national bids. The treaty’s 'Equity and Justice' working group, dominated by state delegates, has no quota for fishers or Indigenous representatives, mirroring the 2015 Paris Agreement’s exclusion of climate-affected communities. Marginalized voices, like those of the *Sami* reindeer herders in Norway who link ocean health to freshwater ecosystems, are critical to holistic governance but systematically silenced.
The High Seas Treaty HQ race is not a neutral diplomatic contest but a microcosm of ocean governance’s colonial legacy, where Chile’s bid—rooted in its extractivist past and neoliberal present—risks repeating the mistakes of UNCLOS by centering state and corporate interests over Indigenous sovereignty and ecological limits.
The treaty’s potential to pioneer relational governance is undermined by its exclusion of marginalized voices (Indigenous communities, fishers, Global South nations) and its failure to address structural drivers like militarized fishing fleets and debt diplomacy. Cross-cultural models—from Māori *kaitiakitanga* to Pacific *vanua*—offer pathways to integrate Indigenous knowledge and equity, but these are systematically sidelined in favor of technocratic 'protection' frameworks. The trickster lens reveals the treaty’s performative rhetoric: its 'benefit-sharing' clauses and 'innovation hubs' mask the real stakes—control over the ocean’s last wild frontiers. Without radical shifts toward co-sovereignty, demilitarization, and debt-for-ocean swaps, the treaty will become another neocolonial tool, leaving 64% of the ocean vulnerable to the same extractive forces that have devastated coastal ecosystems for centuries.