As discussions advance towards the BBNJ PrepCom, Júlia Schütz Veiga and I are pleased to share our latest article, published in Frontiers in Marine Science: “Between technological innovation and the ocean commons: intellectual property and benefit-sharing under the BBNJ Agreement.”
In this article, we engage with a question that sits at the core of current negotiations: Can the BBNJ Agreement deliver equitable benefit-sharing if the global innovation system remains structured around exclusivity?
We argue that the challenge is not merely institutional design, but a structural tension between legal orders. As negotiations move towards implementation, several issues require careful attention: upstream control over sequencing technologies, data infrastructures and bioinformatics pipelines; the growing centrality of digital sequence information (DSI) and risks of “post-access appropriation”; the gap between formal access to marine genetic resources (MGRs) and the effective capacity to generate value; and the need to connect utilisation — not only access — to benefit-sharing obligations.
The paper suggests that the implementation choices ahead will determine whether equity remains aspirational or becomes operational.
We hope this contribution can support ongoing discussions as the community moves from treaty-making to implementation. Many thanks to Harriet Harden-Davies and Emmanuel Kolawole Oke for their inputs in this work, and to the editors and reviewers for their valuable contributions to this publication.
The full article is available open access at Frontiers in Marine Science: https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2026.1755275
Henrique Marcos 