#44 The Common Heritage: Rozemarijn Roland Holst Explains Evolution of an Idealistic Principle

In this episode, Dr. Rozemarijn Roland Holst, Lecturer in International Environmental Law at the University of Edinburgh, traces the full arc of the Common Heritage of Mankind principle: how it emerged from Arvid Pardo’s 1967 UN speech, what different states understood it to mean through the UNCLOS negotiations, how the 1994 Implementing Agreement reshaped the regime, and what its open-ended character means for the exploitation regulations still being developed today.

Roze also brings two frameworks into the conversation that are increasingly relevant to the ISA’s work — the “epistemology of crisis,” which examines how urgency-based arguments shape which trade-offs get treated as inevitable, and relational approaches to governance, which offer a different lens for understanding how values beyond extraction and conservation tend to get left out of regulatory design. For those following the ISA’s ongoing regulatory process, the BBNJ agreement’s handling of benefit-sharing, or debates around what “equitable distribution” should look like in practice, this episode is a detailed and legally grounded look at the intellectual history behind the concepts still driving those negotiations.

Follow Rozemarijn

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rozemarijnrolandholst/

Chapters

* 00:00:00 — Introduction

* 00:00:24 — Why Deep Sea Mining Is a Test Case for Bigger Questions

* 00:12:17 — Arvid Pardo and the Origins of Common Heritage

* 00:22:09 — Benefit Sharing and the UNCLOS Negotiations

* 00:26:46 — How the 1994 Implementing Agreement Changed Everything

* 00:33:01 — What Does "Benefit of Humankind" Actually Mean?

* 00:39:14 — Where the Regime Stands Today

* 00:45:31 — The Epistemology of Crisis

* 00:53:32 — Relational Approaches to Governance

* 00:59:45 — How Should We Think About Trade-Offs?

* 01:05:09 — The Case for Deliberative Processes

* 01:09:01 — Current Research & Recommended Resources

Resources Mentioned

1. Arvid Pardo’s 1967 UN Speech

The foundational speech designating the deep seabed as “common heritage of mankind.”

* UN document reference: A/C.1/PV.1515, 1 November 1967

* Overview & context: https://www.un.org/press/en/1999/19990716.SEA1619.html

* Malta government essay on Pardo: https://foreign.gov.mt/malta-360-insights/how-one-maltese-diplomat-gave-the-world-the-law-of-the-sea/

2. Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge) — History of Common Heritage & the Deep Seabed Regime

* “Global Commons” article (EJIL, 2016): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3427314

* “The Seabed and the South: From Stock Stories to New Histories” (2024): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4730113

* Cambridge faculty page: https://cambridge.academia.edu/SurabhiRanganathan

* The Common Heritage of Mankind: Annotations on a Battle | The Battle for International Law: South-North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era | Oxford Academic (not open access)

3. Julia Dehm — Law, Values, and Environmental Trade-offs

* Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=n-SZpT8AAAAJ

* Book Reconsidering REDD+ (Cambridge University Press): https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/reconsidering-redd/5D54EFE59BBA35999FEEBD9ACA8EA449

* Question of Value: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/locating-nature/reconfiguring-environmental-governance-in-the-green-economy/7C1C6F265A28EC180A518507B31F8BCF

* Question of Value: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003221920-14/legally-constituting-value-nature-julia-dehm

4. Kyle Whyte — Epistemology of Crisis / Indigenous Studies

(Referenced by Roze as the source of the “epistemology of crisis” concept)

* Faculty page (University of Michigan): https://seas.umich.edu/research/faculty/kyle-whyte

* Crisis Epistemology: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3891125