Blue seas thinking: A comparative approach to understanding deep-sea mining politics in the UK and Japan

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Deep-sea mining (DSM) has emerged globally as the next major frontier of resource extraction. Faced with the challenging combination of economic opportunity and political and ecological uncertainty, a burgeoning range of strategies are being mobilised that aim to shape development pathways for an industry framed as a solution for a sustainable and secure resource supply in the future. This is nowhere better exemplified by than the distinct efforts being made by the UK and Japan governments, who are positioning their respective countries to be at the threshold of DSM activity as it emerges. Japan, for example, completed the world's first extraction of zinc, gold and other metals from the 5000 feet deep seabed near the coast of Okinawa in 2017. The UK meanwhile, is one of the limited number of countries to have established specific DSM legislation, with its amended Deep Sea Ming Act passed in 2014. However, for all the ever-increasing body of work examining the potential environmental impacts of DSM, there remains an ongoing failure to analyse its political and social consequences.This is partly because the deep-sea itself has historically been understood to lack significant social or political dimensions. DSM's supposed lack of human impact has seen it marginalised from debates that have tended to focus narrowly on the environmental impacts of proposed mining activity. Moreover, in marginalising social and political thought from their discussion, most current studies of DSM threaten to continue the tradition of treating politics as something predominantly human in nature. Against this background, an expert network of UK and Japanese scholars propose to connect the world-first and unique, Japanese experience of DSM extraction, with the theoretical advances on the topic being led by academic work in the UK. Through a series of workshops, public presentations, parliamentary evidence giving and public exhibitions, it aims to mutually strengthen social science's treatment of the deep-ocean in both Japan and UK. This will lead to research and policy publications, input to the 'Sustainable Seas' enquiry at the UK Parliamentary Environmental Audit Committee as well as significant training opportunities for early career researchers foregrounding social science in the debate on DSM. It will also be foundational for preparing a research design to tackle future research challenges presented by DSM as it emerges.