Let me start with two disclosures.
First, Bianca Haas is a friend. We have talked about fisheries governance in enough places that I cannot pretend to read her work as a neutral party. The second disclosure is closer to envy than to conflict of interest: I do not know how she publishes at the rate she does. Paper after paper, peer-reviewed, on topics that actually matter, while the rest of us are still deciding whether we have time to turn a good idea into a draft. So when a new one lands in my inbox, I read it, partly out of loyalty and partly out of professional curiosity about where she finds the hours.
The paper is "Equity in the contemporary oceans governance framework: a stocktake of UNCLOS and its implementing agreements", by Bianca Haas, Frances Anggadi and Jeonghee Lim, published open access in International Environmental Agreements in August 2026.
I read it just after a week of sitting through a COFI session in which one large country delegation spent its time surgically removing the words fairness, equity, inclusion, and climate change from anything they could reach. Bracket by bracket. Paragraph by paragraph. Reading the two back-to-back was strange.
The paper was refreshing. The memory of the meeting was infuriating. Both feelings are, I think, correct.
What they actually did
The method is simple in the best sense of the word: easy to describe and likely tedious to execute.
They took Nathan Bennett’s six dimensions of ocean equity, designed for local and national contexts, and adapted them to international legal text. Recognitional equity, which is whose rights, values and knowledge get acknowledged at all. Procedural equity, which is who gets to participate in decisions. Management equity is who holds leadership and authority. Distributional equity, which is who gets the benefits and who carries the harms. Environmental equity, which is how environmental benefits and burdens fall across stakeholders. And contextual equity, which is whether the text acknowledges the broader conditions that enable or undermine all of the above.
Then they went through UNCLOS, the 1994 Agreement, the UN Fish Stocks Agreement, and the BBNJ Agreement, article by article (including the preamble and annexes), and asked a yes-or-no question for each dimension against each article. They split the work, then cross-checked each other’s samples to blunt the effect of individual bias, which is the right instinct given that what counts as equitable is not a value-free judgement, and they say so openly in the methods.
This is not a glamorous exercise. It is the legal equivalent of a port inspection: you open every hold, and you write down what you found rather than what you expected to find. I have a lot of time for that.
What they found
The headline is that equity has become steadily more visible across the four instruments. BBNJ has by far the highest proportion of articles engaging at least one equity dimension, with recognitional equity showing up in around 39 per cent of articles and procedural in around 29 per cent. UNCLOS and UNFSA sit much lower and look broadly similar.
Recognitional equity is the dimension used most across all four texts, followed by procedural. That ordering is worth sitting with for a moment, because it is not neutral. Recognising that a stakeholder exists is the cheapest thing a treaty can do. Letting them into the room is more expensive but still survivable. Giving them a share of the benefit, or relieving them of a burden, is where the money is, and distributional equity is exactly where the counts thin out.
The stakeholder analysis makes the same point from another direction. UNCLOS recognises three categories of affected stakeholders: developing states, landlocked states and geographically disadvantaged states. UNFSA adds coastal fishing communities, artisanal fishers, small island developing states, and women fishworkers, which for 1995 was genuinely ahead of its time and which anyone who works in the Pacific will recognise as the textual hook that much later work hangs from. BBNJ is broader again: small island developing states appear most, then Indigenous peoples and local communities, then developing states, then least developed countries, coastal African states, archipelagic states, developing middle-income countries, and explicit attention to gender balance.
And then there is the finding that I keep coming back to. Across all four instruments, over decades of negotiation, they could not find a single provision that engaged management equity as they defined it, meaning leadership in and authority over management activities held by the affected stakeholders themselves. Not one. They are appropriately modest about this and suggest it may be a limitation of their interpretation, or a sign that management authority is a national rather than international matter. Both are fair. But from where I sit, having spent most of my working life around coastal states trying to convert paper rights into actual control over the fisheries in their own waters, the absence reads as a finding rather than an artefact.
As a coastal state, the international framework is comfortable acknowledging you, moderately comfortable letting you speak, and structurally silent on letting you run the all thing.
The 1994 Agreement, or why I stopped feeling refreshed
The part of this paper that should be compulsory reading is the discussion of the 1994 Agreement, because it takes the comforting story of progress and puts a hole in it.
On the raw percentages, the 1994 Agreement looks fine. Higher proportion of articles touching recognitional and procedural equity than UNCLOS or UNFSA. But it has ten articles plus an annex, so percentages of a very small number do a lot of work; more importantly, the substance runs the other way.
The authors walk through it. UNCLOS Annex III Article 5 originally envisaged mandatory transfer of seabed mining technology to developing states and the Enterprise on fair and reasonable terms. The 1994 Agreement removed that and replaced it with the open market. UNCLOS Article 155 guaranteed a Review Conference after fifteen years of commercial production to ask, among other things, whether the system had actually delivered equitable sharing of benefits to developing states. The 1994 Agreement removed the guarantee. Production ceilings, subsidies, the reserved area system, economic assistance to land-based producer developing states: all weakened or gone, with commercial interests correspondingly elevated.
The original Part XI was negotiated in the era of the New International Economic Order, and the drafters wrote substantive equality into it. As Surabhi Ranganathan puts it, developing states appeared to have won. Which is precisely why it was reopened and renegotiated. The common heritage of mankind is still there in the text, and it is still the part of UNCLOS with the highest absolute count of equity references in this study, but its practical expression was hollowed out by the very instrument that made the Convention acceptable to the industrialised world.
So the authors' conclusion is not that equity advances over time. It is that equity has become more visible and more diversified, while its distributive content has not been strengthened to any comparable degree. Uneven layering is their phrase. I would put it less politely. The language of equity expanded at roughly the rate at which it stopped costing anyone anything.
Why I was infuriated, and why the paper still helps
Which brings me back to the FAO COFI meeting room. Watching a delegation strip fairness, equity, and climate out of a text is depressing. They fight over that language because language is the raw material from which obligations are later built, and they know it better than most of the people defending it. Arvid Pardo said international law does not exist in a vacuum, that it reflects the beliefs and perceived interests of the most influential states at any given time. The authors quote him. He was right in 1984 and he was right in that room.
What this paper gives the rest of us is a baseline. If you want to argue that the framework already obliges something, you now have a systematic, article-level map of where equity actually sits in the four instruments that matter, rather than a general sense that it is in there somewhere. That is useful in negotiations, and it will be more useful in litigation, particularly now that the ICJ has treated equity as a guiding principle for interpreting other rules of international law in its climate advisory opinion.
The obvious limitation is one the authors name themselves: this is a study of text, not of practice. A yes against an article tells you the hook exists, not that anyone has hung anything on it. The implementation question is the whole ballgame, and it is the next study, and I hope somebody does it before I retire.
Given Bianca’s output, it will probably be out by March.
Haas, B., Anggadi, F. & Lim, J. (2026). Equity in the contemporary oceans governance framework: a stocktake of UNCLOS and its implementing agreements. International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-026-09735-y. Open access, so there is no excuse.