Abstract
Despite the significant environmental and social concerns associated with deep-sea mining, the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the organization tasked with governing the international seabed—is working to finalize a mining code. State and private sector proponents justify these developments as necessary to expand renewable energy and battery production, but this claim remains contested. Under international rules, commercial actors—whether private or state-owned—can hold exploration licenses in tandem with sponsoring states, yet we know little about how corporate actors are shaping governance of the sector. It is difficult to disentangle the positions of states from those of private firms and market actors, and there remain significant gaps in our knowledge of how ownership and finance in the sector are structured and organized. We argue that deep-sea mining represents a paradigmatic case of growing distance in environmental governance. In this case, the capacity of international actors to prevent or effectively regulate the ecological and social harms of deep-sea mining is challenged by the opacity and mutability of corporate structures. The implications, we suggest, are twofold: the redistribution of risk to states and local communities, and the undermining of the common heritage of humankind principle embedded in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.