Into the Abyss: Deep-sea Mining, Geo-politics and Global Development

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Despite the fact that the deep-sea is by degrees, imperceptible and a boundary to human knowledge, the race to mine it is on. This project will analyse the emergent political challenges of sustainable deep-sea mining taking into account conflicting social interests, the ways in which the deep sea bed is sensed and imagined, and the physical properties of the deep ocean itself. Increasing global demand for economically and strategically important resources such as gold, copper, rare-earth metals and phosphates, coupled with advances in mining technology, has meant that the deep-sea has emerged for the first time as a key site of resource extraction. The industry, which already explores over 1 million sq.km of deep-sea bed, is expected to be worth £40 billion over the next 30 years to the UK alone. To this end, debates have opened up which have focused on the economic and environmental impacts of the deep-sea mining (DSM) industry. Thus the deep sea is increasingly considered in terms of profitability and safety rather than in terms of ownership, ethics and competing politics. In failing to sufficiently take into account the deep sea's political dimensions, current research misses out in explaining how DSM governance comes into being. How is deep-sea mining imagined, visualised and mapped by different stakeholders? Can DSM be part of international development strategies in the global South? What role do the resources, properties and dynamics of the deep-sea play in political issue formation? By addressing these questions through a critical social science reading of DSM, this project has a key role to play in understanding competing global, national and local geopolitical 'imaginaries' - or ways of understanding the deep-sea - and their profound conceptual and substantive implications for DSM research and policy. It offers a comparative study of the two key nation-states in the global South that are engaging actively, but differently, with the prospect of DSM: Papua New Guinea (PNG), which has embraced its economic potential in the country's development plan; and Namibia, which has issued a temporary moratorium on all DSM activity prior to its inclusion in any national development strategy. More radically, how might taking the physical properties of the deep sea itself seriously change the way we think about the politics and policies of resource extraction? Conceptually, it will be the first to bridge emergent contemporary work on both ocean and subsurface geographies and to consider how an engagement with the physical properties of the ocean itself changes the way we think about the politics and policies of DSM. It will build a new conceptual understanding of deep-sea geopolitics by generating new qualitative data through interviews and focus groups with senior government officials in Namibia and PNG, affected communities, global activists, lawyers and oceanographers. Working with communities affected by potential DSM in Namibia and PNG, it will produce new types of 'participatory' maps, that will offer alternative political futures for DSM. It will also comprehensively analyse texts relating to DSM legal treaties and political speeches in order to show how DSM politics is contemporarily made and to influence how it is shaped in the future. Among many other activities, the research will do this at a national scale by producing public policy briefings for UK parliamentary use and globally by working with the International Seabed Authority (the key global regulator of the deep-sea) to create new, critical ways of mapping and governing DSM. Both a physical and online exhibition will show the ways in which alternative ways of imagining the deep-sea can challenge and shape the emergent policy agendas that regulate the mining of it. These outcomes will provide an invaluable resource for a range of current and future users from activists to policy makers, researchers to communities affected by the changing landscapes of DSM activity.