Beyond the Mining Code: The ISA’s Search for Institutional Credibility

The International Seabed Authority’s meetings in Kingston concluded on 31 July with the Mining Code once again dominating much of the discussion. Progress in the negotiations remains important, but the session also revealed a quieter change in the Authority’s role. Attention is increasingly shifting to whether the Authority can provide the institutional foundations needed for any future decision on commercial exploitation to command confidence.

The July agenda reflected this development across several areas of the Authority’s work. The Council continued negotiations on the Mining Code and, on 24 July, agreed on a roadmap for the work still required before the regulations could be adopted, including further intercessional engagement on unresolved provisions. Discussions concerning the Enterprise focused on its legal status, potential operational role and the practical arrangements required for it to assume more substantive functions. Meanwhile, the Legal and Technical Commission advanced work on standards and guidelines, environmental threshold values, regional environmental management plans, contractor reporting and data management. The budget debate pointed in the same direction, drawing greater attention to the scientific, administrative and compliance resources required as the Authority’s responsibilities expand.

These discussions show that the ISA’s institutional development cannot simply be postponed until the Mining Code is complete. The Authority is already performing many of the preparatory, supervisory and administrative functions associated with an international regulator, even though the final framework for commercial exploitation remains under negotiation.

This development also reflects a broader change in the debate over deep-sea mining. For much of the past decade, debate centered on whether commercial exploitation should begin at all, an issue that continues to carry considerable political and ethical weight. As the regulatory process has advanced, attention has increasingly turned to the conditions under which any future exploitation would be governed and to whether the resulting system could command confidence among member States, scientific communities and the wider public.

Scientific uncertainty helps explain why these governance questions have become more pressing. Environmental baseline knowledge remains uneven across large parts of the Area, while monitoring methodologies continue to develop and cumulative impacts are difficult to assess across contract areas, over extended timeframes and within ecological systems that are still only partly understood. Such uncertainties cannot be set aside until the legal framework is complete, because they already bear directly on the Authority’s credibility.  Where knowledge is incomplete, confidence will depend on the quality of the evidence collected, the independence and transparency of the review process, and the institution’s willingness to adjust its approach as new findings emerge.

Legal developments have added further weight to these concerns. The provisional-measures orders issued by the Seabed Disputes Chamber on 18 July in the NORI and TOML cases did not interrupt the Authority’s ongoing work, while bringing procedural integrity more clearly into view. The orders gave greater prominence to due process, transparency and fairness within the legal setting in which seabed governance is developing, particularly in relation to the Authority’s supervision of contractors. As disputes over oversight and compliance become more likely, the ISA’s legitimacy will depend as much on the clarity and fairness of its procedures as on the substance of its decisions.

The political context surrounding deep-sea mining has also grown more complex over the past decade. Concerns over the energy transition, critical minerals, supply-chain resilience and strategic competition now overlap with longstanding debates about environmental protection and the common heritage of humankind.  The United States has further complicated this landscape by advancing a domestic licensing pathway for seabed mineral activities beyond national jurisdiction, raising questions about the relationship between national regulatory initiatives and the multilateral framework administered by the ISA. Developing States continue to emphasize participation, equity and benefit-sharing, while scientific organizations and civil society have placed growing emphasis on ecological uncertainty and long-term environmental risk.  The Authority therefore operates within an increasingly contested governance environment in which geopolitical competition, environmental precaution and competing claims of regulatory authority increasingly intersect.

As the ISA moves into the next phase of its work, confidence in the regime will depend especially on greater transparency, stronger scientific and technical capacity, and a regulatory approach capable of responding to new evidence.

Transparency should remain a central priority, particularly in the work of the Legal and Technical Commission, the circulation of documents and the explanation of technical and scientific judgments. As political scrutiny intensifies, confidence will depend increasingly on whether member States can follow the reasoning behind key recommendations, assess the evidence on which they rest and identify the uncertainties that remain. Formal compliance with legal procedures provides only part of that assurance; the wider decision-making process must also be sufficiently open to sustain trust in the Authority’s work.

Greater transparency, however, will have limited value unless member States possess the expertise and resources needed to make effective use of the information available. Scientific and technical capacity therefore deserves particular attention, especially for developing States. Participation in the ISA now requires members to evaluate environmental baselines, scrutinize monitoring plans, interpret regulatory standards and understand the legal and financial consequences of institutional choices. Capacity-building bears directly on the quality of decision-making across the regime. The common heritage principle will carry limited practical meaning if many members retain a formal voice while lacking the capacity to participate on comparable terms.

Information and expertise, in turn, must feed into a regulatory system capable of learning from experience. However detailed the eventual Mining Code may be, it cannot anticipate every scientific, environmental and operational issue that may arise. Knowledge of deep-sea ecosystems will continue to develop, while any future exploitation would generate experience capable of revealing gaps in existing standards, procedures and assumptions. Periodic revision should therefore be understood as an ordinary part of governing under uncertainty. The durability of the regime will depend on whether the ISA establishes credible review mechanisms, preserves sufficient institutional flexibility and develops a consistent practice of adjusting its approach in light of new evidence.

The Kingston meetings marked another step in the ISA’s emergence as a governing institution. Completion of the Mining Code will remain an important milestone, but the Authority’s longer-term standing will be shaped by the practices that surround it: the assessment of scientific evidence, the exercise of oversight and the willingness to revise rules as circumstances change. The significance of July therefore lies in the clearer view it offered of what credible governance of the international seabed will require.