Quick context on how this conversation even happened, because it’ll change how you watch it.
We were both speaking at a BBNJ symposium in Rio de Janeiro. We were on a panel about traditional knowledge and Indigenous Peoples. Mariana was there too, a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh, and her project is actually looking at stakeholder engagement in how these area-based tools get implemented, whether the process that builds them stays open and honest or quietly locks people out.
We met, we hit it off, and shortly after she asked me to sit for an interview for her research. I cut out her actual questions from the video, so what you’re watching isn’t really an interview anymore, it’s a conversation, and I think you’ll feel that in the flow of it even without hearing what she asked.
Watch the whole thing, obviously.
But there’s one moment in there that most people are going to scroll right past, because it’s buried under a lot of other really good stuff. I want to stop on it, because once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it explains basically everything about why these processes move the way they move.
Quick context if BBNJ is new to you
BBNJ is the treaty covering the high seas, the ocean areas that don’t belong to any one country. It just got adopted, and now the real work starts: building the actual bodies and committees that will run it. One of those bodies is called the SBSTA, a scientific and technical subsidiary body, and it’s going to have a lot of say over things like where marine protected areas get placed and how traditional knowledge gets weighed against lab science.
The rule nobody notices
Here’s the moment.
In the interview, we talk about how the members of that subsidiary body get chosen. And the rule, as written, is that every single member has to be nominated by a state party. A government picks them. The community they’re supposed to represent doesn’t get a vote in it.
I want you to actually feel how absurd this is, not just nod along and move to the next paragraph.
The Austria problem
That means, in theory, a country decides who is a legitimate Indigenous knowledge holder. Any country. Including a country with zero Indigenous Peoples inside its own borders. In the interview I use Austria as the example, and I want to be clear, I’m not picking on Austria, they just happened to be the most recent country to ratify at the time.
Can you actually picture that meeting?
A delegation from a country with no Indigenous Peoples of its own, sitting in a room, deciding whether someone from the Pacific or the Arctic has “relevant knowledge.” That’s the whole ballgame right there, decided by people who have no basis to make that call.
There’s a line I say in there that I want you to actually sit with, because it’s the whole argument in 8 words: It takes an Indigenous person to recognize an Indigenous person.
That’s it. That’s the entire fight.
So what did we do about it
We pushed for something different, a separate mechanism, sitting outside the subsidiary bodies, that gets to write its own rules for who’s in it. Maybe split into chambers, one for Indigenous Peoples, one for local communities, and inside the Indigenous chamber, the members choose themselves. No state picks them. We tried first to get actual seats inside the SBSTA itself, direct membership, and we lost that fight, more than once. So we rerouted, and spent the next round of talks building this instead.
The paragraph that only works if you fight for it
And here’s the thing about that redesign that I think is actually the most important part, more important than the mechanism itself. That redesign only has teeth because of one paragraph, in the preamble of the treaty, that says nothing in the agreement can be read to diminish the rights Indigenous Peoples already have under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
That paragraph doesn’t operate the negotiating room by itself. It only works if somebody in that room stands up every single time and refuses to let it sit there decorative. That’s a choice, made over and over, by people who show up.
Same thing is coming for you, wherever you’re working.
Some rule, written by people with good intentions and zero standing to make the call, quietly puts the decision in the wrong hands. You won’t always get the direct seat. Sometimes you build the workaround instead. But you don’t get either one unless you’re in the room refusing to let the good paragraph just sit there.
Honestly, this is the exact question at the center of Mariana’s research: Whether the process that builds these ABMTs and MPAs stays inclusive and transparent enough for it to actually matter who’s in the room. The tools are getting built either way. What’s still up for grabs is whether that room stays honest while it happens.
Why I told her to hit record again
One more thing.
We were done. Mariana had wrapped up the interview, stopped recording, and we were just talking, winding down. Then she thought of one more question. And before I even answered it, I stopped her. Hang on, hang on, hit record, you’re going to want this one too.
Nobody made me do that.
She’d already gotten what she needed for her research. I could have just answered and let it go. But the whole point, for me, is to be of value to whoever I’m talking to, invited or not, on the record or off it. It’s the same lesson as the Austria thing, honestly.
You show up fully whether anyone’s rolling camera or not, every time, without waiting to be asked.
