Benefitting from the Common Heritage of Humankind: From Expectation to Reality

The international seabed ‘Area’ and its mineral resources are the common heritage of mankind and must be administered for the benefit of humankind as a whole. Yet the vision of the benefits to be reaped from the Area has changed over the years. The common heritage concept encapsulates seemingly conflicting developmental, commercial, and ecological imperatives. With seabed mining edging closer to becoming a reality, there is a need to analyse these imperatives and the range of benefits that humankind can (and in some cases already does) derive from the Area. This article critically discusses six categories of benefits that are relevant to seabed mining and assesses them against historical expectations. These are wealth generation and redistribution, advancement of developing States, security of mineral supply, ecosystem services, scientific knowledge, and other uses of the Area.

5. The tragedy of the commons and sovereign rights

This chapter assesses the rights governing access to globally shared natural resources, such as fish stocks, deep seabed minerals, and clean air. The international system is based on the principle of national sovereignty, which says that each state has absolute, perpetual, and exclusive rights within its national territory. This construction does not, however, match ecological realities. There is a stark contrast between states' territorial divisions and the biosphere's ecological connectedness. The chapter explores this tension and its relationship to decision-making in natural resource management. How can sovereign states manage the earth's resources if they are fragmented in separate territories that overlap complex ecosystems? This question is often approached using the ‘tragedy of the commons’ metaphor. When the metaphor is applied to the global commons, two main policy options emerge. The first is a coordinated approach building on the notion of a ‘common heritage of humankind’. The second policy option is a decentralized approach based on states' sovereign rights.

Treasure in the vault: The guardianship of ‘heritage’ seeds, fruit and vegetables

Crop heritage is a growing global phenomenon whereby people conceive of change to agriculture in terms of loss, issuing calls to safeguard what remains for future generations. This article seeks to understand what it means to think about food and the politics of its production and consumption through the frame of ‘heritage’ by interrogating a prevalent metaphor of plants and seeds as ‘treasure’. It argues the metaphor is more than decorative; it is strategic in producing certain conceptualizations of heritage value. While crop diversity is held to be important, and the great range of food plants a ‘common heritage of humankind’, the treasure metaphor is used in ways that impede the maintenance of that diversity, establishing seeds, plants and genes as precious materials best looked after by expert guardians in secure ‘vaults’, ‘banks’ and walled gardens. Thus this particular conception of ‘treasure’ as a universal good actually plays an important role in legitimizing and normalizing the privatization of crops heritage resources.