Quick context before you watch.
I was actually supposed to be at this one in person, a BBNJ symposium in Brazil, but instead I was in the middle of HRC negotiations in cold Geneva, joining by video, apologizing to the organizers for not making it.
I’m not going to pretend that’s not a little funny.
Everyone else got Brazil. I got Geneva in the cold season.
Anyway.
What I said on that panel came straight out of the IITC policy briefs but also consultations we’ve been running, including one just before this with Pacific Indigenous Peoples, co-organized with our friends at the High Seas Alliance.
I want to stop on three things I said, because each one is doing more work than it sounds like on first listen.
Contribution without authority
Here’s the first one, and it’s the line I’d want you to remember if you only remember one. Indigenous knowledge showing up late in a process isn’t the same as Indigenous knowledge shaping that process.
If the categories are already fixed, if the assessment is already framed, if the proposal already exists on paper, and Indigenous knowledge only enters through a consultation bolted onto the end, that’s not co-creation. I called it, on the panel, contribution without authority.
You can see exactly what this looks like with marine protected areas, MPAs for short, the actual zones BBNJ will designate for protection. Picture the moment an Indigenous knowledge holder looks at a shortlist of proposed areas and says, that’s not the strongest site, the better one is over here.
If that conversation happens after the shortlist is locked, the knowledge holder is reacting to someone else’s frame. If it happens while the shortlist is still being built, they’re shaping the outcome. Same person, same knowledge, same expertise.
Completely different amount of power, depending only on timing.
That’s why timing and location are the whole fight, not a technical footnote to it. Once knowledge enters an institution, the institution decides what counts, what gets translated, what gets validated, what gets quietly set aside.
Show up before that filter exists, and you’re part of building it. Show up after, and you’re asking permission to be heard by it.
The fight over who picks the people in the room
Second thing.
There’s a proposal on the table for a dedicated Indigenous advisory mechanism, sitting inside the BBNJ structure, with Indigenous experts placed as actual members, not observers, in bodies like the Scientific and Technical Body and the clearinghouse mechanism, and eventually every subsidiary body under the COP.
If you read the Austria piece, you already know this fight, state-controlled nomination deciding who counts as a legitimate Indigenous voice.
This mechanism is the answer to that, scaled up on purpose. Instead of fighting nomination rules body by body, the proposal builds one standing structure, grounded in Indigenous self-selection, organized around the seven Indigenous sociocultural regions the UN system already recognizes, and it plugs that structure directly into every room where the actual work happens.
Self-selection instead of state-controlled nomination. That’s the whole mechanism, in five words. And it’s the difference, as I put it on the panel, between being heard and having influence.
We are not a vulnerable group
Third thing, and it came up when I circled back near the end.
Under international law, Indigenous Peoples are not a vulnerable group and not a generic stakeholder category. We’re distinct rights holders, which is exactly why the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples sits inside the treaty’s preamble and not off in some side annex.
That distinction isn’t academic. It changes what kind of seat you’re entitled to ask for. A vulnerable group gets consulted. A rights holder gets to help write the rules.
This old line covers it better than I can: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.
Being at that table, structurally, permanently, not as a favor granted meeting by meeting, is the actual ask underneath everything else I said that day.
Why three dozen references still isn’t enough
BBNJ’s text is genuinely strong on paper.
Over three dozen references to Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge, rights, and values. All decisions are supposed to be made using the best available science and the knowledge of Indigenous Peoples together.
That’s the hard law, and it’s real, and it’s more than a lot of treaties manage.
But hard law sitting in a text and hard law operating inside a room are two different things, and the distance between them is exactly what the next few years, leading up to COP1, are going to be spent closing or failing to close.
I said this to close out the panel, and I’ll say it again here:
The real test isn’t whether Indigenous knowledge gets welcomed rhetorically. The real test is whether the system gets built so that knowledge can shape outcomes, enter early, and stay governed with integrity the whole way through.
That’s where co-creation stops being a word people use in opening remarks and starts being something that actually happened.
