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‘We need to rethink how we govern our oceans’
Surabhi Ranganathan is helping frame international laws for what is arguably the world’s biggest and most pivotal shared resource. See how it’s going.
Surabhi Ranganathan calls the oceans “a space both real and imagined”.
We suffer from sea blindness, she adds. Despite the ocean covering seven-tenths of the planet, it remains an overlooked space in the global consciousness. It is often perceived as remote and lawless, yet it drives climate, trade and communication.
Once in a while, an event such as the six-day 2021 Suez Canal blockage by the container ship Ever Given disrupts global supply chains, and people notice the ocean’s critical role.
But its role is ever-present and immediate, wherever in the world one may be, says Ranganathan, 42.
How we manage our relationships with it has implications for economic and climate justice. And we haven’t been doing a stellar job so far.
“From plastic pollution in the Mariana Trench to the impact of ocean acidification on weather systems... I think of the ocean as almost incredibly crowded. There is no part of it today that is untouched by the human presence. This calls for a profound rethinking of ocean governance,” Ranganathan says.
Over 10 years, her research into new international laws has focused on rethinking our governance of our activities in it, by working to frame laws that would potentially regulate deep-sea mining, and promote fairer and more sustainable collaboration in the shared global resource of the deep seas.
Currently a professor of law and deputy director of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge, her interdisciplinary approach — which takes into account international law as well as history, political economy, indigenous community efforts, and lessons learnt from the ills of colonialism — has now won her the prestigious Max Planck-Humboldt Research Award, endowed with €1.5 million.
The laws that govern the sea are in flux, she points out. Speculative and exploratory operations in the deep seas have begun.
“If the way we approach this resource is primarily extractive, then that warps our understanding of the ocean, and our relationship with it,” she says. “If the means are such as to concentrate knowledge in the hands of a few, then that warps the politics of ocean governance.”
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Growing up in Delhi, the seas were the furthest thing from Ranganathan’s mind. But she was always fascinated by science. “I wanted to be an astronaut,” she says.
As a child, she marvelled at the worldbuilding in science-fiction and fantasy novels such as Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. In the Russian children’s publications that flooded India’s major cities in the 1980s and 1990s, she read about wormholes and the space-time continuum. “Those ideas excited me,” she says.
She had planned to graduate in physics, until her parents, banker TCA Ranganathan and Delhi University professor Namita Ranganathan, pointed her in the direction of law, pressing her to take the entrance test for the National Law School of India University (NLSIU) in Bengaluru. Once she had passed it, Ranganathan became intrigued by its five-year LLB (Hons) course that combined law and the humanities.
“It was intellectually stimulating,” she says. There were papers in history, economics, sociology and political science, and the famous Law, Poverty and Development curriculum taught by Babu Mathew.
The course helped her gain a deeper understanding of the material structures of colonialism, the mechanics of decolonisation, exploitation and global inequality. These ideas have remained central to her work.
A Master’s degree at New York University followed, and she began to work at the NYU School of Law’s Institute for International Law and Justice under scholars such as Benedict Kingsbury. “I became interested in global governance, how it is assembled and who the actors are,” Ranganathan says.
This led her to Cambridge, and a PhD under professor James Crawford (who would later serve as a judge at the International Court of Justice). Her doctoral thesis explored treaty conflicts, inspired by the India-US nuclear deal of 2005, which reshaped global nuclear governance.
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It was at this point that she began to be drawn towards the oceans.
“I was looking for cases where multilateral treaties were altered by smaller agreements,” Ranganathan says. UNCLOS, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, emerged as a prime example.
In what had been one of the world’s largest international law-making experiments, countries of the Global South had fought to frame this treaty equitably, through negotiations that lasted 15 years.
“They were seeking to answer the question: Who is the ocean for,” as Ranganathan puts it.
The result was a treaty that offered what she calls “a new political economic vision”. Instead of a market-driven hierarchy, states would act collectively. Industrialised nations would share resources with developing states and jointly mine seabeds, sharing profits from resources such as rare earth elements, to fund global development.
The Global South was satisfied. The Global North was not. “The US spearheaded smaller agreements to revise the UNCLOS vision,” Ranganathan says. Led by the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, allies such as the UK and then-West Germany walked out of negotiations, rejecting the treaty.
“After 12 years of diplomatic pressure, the 1994 Implementation Agreement radically revised the regime in favour of industrialised states.”
On two key fronts, capital investment and technology, the Global North now holds sway over what happens in the deep seas. While UNCLOS formally urges a collaborative approach, its regime places states in competition with each other. Thus countries such as India are developing their own ability to mine seabeds, in order to stay in the race.
But particularly when it comes to the oceans, we must listen to all voices, Ranganathan says. The tussle within countries is vital to acknowledge too.
Within the Global South, she points out, governments push blue-economy projects such as fisheries in Eastern Africa and the blue economic corridors within China’s Belt and Road Initiative, while community activists advocate for economic justice and environmental and cultural preservation.
Her current work at Cambridge seeks to develop a “grammar” for studying community thought and action as legal theory. “We need to take such ideas seriously, not just as lived experience but as jurisprudential contributions,” she says.
“It is important to remember that international laws change via strategic mobilisation as much as via legislation itself. For such mobilisation to be effective and progressive, we need compelling new ideas of ocean justice. That is what my research seeks.”
The ocean, after all, is not a vast blue abstraction, she adds. “It is a multi-layered reality, and every decision we make today stands to intensify our effect on it, and the impacts of that on us all.”
