Behind the closed doors of high sea negotiations

Access nearly denied.

For doctoral student Emil W. Hildebrand, this was frustrating, though not entirely unexpected news. He needed to gain access to as many International Seabed Authority (ISA) negotiation meetings as possible to understand how nations come together (or not) to create a potential deep sea mining code. Yet the ISA, generally known to be rather opaque, announced that it will not be using the official UN accreditation system.

Hildebrand eventually found a way in. He associated himself with a Madrid and Vienna-based art institution that had been granted full access. Inside the modernist Kingston headquarters, the tropical setting was open and warm, but the atmosphere was secretive and slightly tense. Overall, the negotiations stretched over nearly 2 weeks, which proved somewhat overwhelming for Emil's first negotiations abroad. Yet despite these challenges, he managed to collect over 70 hours of field note material. 

Negotiating the future of our oceans behind closed doors

The kind of data Emil is collecting is paramount to Alice Vadrot’s work at the Environmental Politics Research Group, which investigates international negotiations on topics of ocean governance and biodiversity in the high seas.

Participating in multilateral environmental negotiations, as she put it, is like "navigating a vast and intricate labyrinth." Crowded rooms including diplomats, NGO (non-governmental organisation) representatives, scientists, legal advisors, journalists, translators, activists and United Nation security staff build the stage, which transforms into a vibrant social theatre play. As negotiations can lead to legal texts that bind nations to environmental standards and rules, each country is keenly aware of the significance of every single word and sentence and will thus try to mould the final text in their favour. 

What appears in the public consciousness, however, is often only the final results of such negotiations — a press release on success or failure or a remark from politicians. The negotiation process itself remains a "black box," even for researchers. 

This is why Vadrot and her team collect data on site and trace how negotiators change their positions throughout various agreement-making setting. They would follow these negotiations over a span of many years up until an agreement is reached, officially approved and put into effect. The meticulously compiled field notes capture the rhythms and revelations of daily interactions among them — sometimes down to a comma or syllable. By gathering this wealth of detail, the team can retrace negotiation points and study contemporary patterns in multilateral environmental diplomacy.

Note-taking between routine and drama

Vadrot started to collect field notes collaboratively in 2018, when her previous ERC project MARIPOLDATA started with the ambition to trace negotiations on a new international agreement on ocean biodiversity (the BBNJ, see box below). This treaty will serve as a baseline to protect life in the high seas, which make up nearly half of Earth’s surface. 

Studying negotiations of a new United Nation treaty promised insights into global (dis)orders and the practise of agreement-making in times when multilateralism and the global sustainability agenda are both under immense threat. The MARIPOLDATA project highlighted deeply rooted global power relations, shaped by political, economic, and social dynamics that are often obscured in the United Nation’s complex system of environmental agreements and diplomatic routines.

Vadrot used this case to develop a methodology to collect field notes systematically and as a team. A key challenge with this method lies in its bold promise of completeness: the ambition to capture every moment within the formal negotiation arena, from each spoken word and to every instance of one state referencing another or speaking for a coalition, which is why she diversified methods used, including on-site surveys and interviews.

No sleep for biodiversity.

Doctoral student Wenwen Lyu captured the details of this summer's BBNJ negotiations through rigorous planning and remote help. Now that the BBNJ Agreement has been adopted in 2023, the focus has now shifted to setting up institutions for the first COP, the Conference of the Parties, a regular meeting to negotiate implementation. That means juggling about 10 documents at once, each one needing careful reading before the meetings even begin. 

The task required absolute focus with Lyu on-site and master student Hristina Talkova online. With the UN liquidity crisis, some parallel sessions are without interpretation or proper facilities, which further complicated data collection. Delegates simply raise their hands to speak, and for field note takers, this meant staying extra sharp: recognising faces, remembering names, and catching every detail in fast-moving informal sessions.

Mastering the dance of collective notetaking

At the core of the team's practise of working together across different sites of multilateral agreement-making is a specialised note-taking method (Vadrot et al. 2025 in Qualitative Research). In it, they distinguish between recording what negotiation participants said and did, and their own reflections on these moments. To systematise the process, they designed a detailed observation matrix capturing not only statements, responses, and interruptions by specific actors, but also context such as the negotiation issue, references to science, timing, meeting format, and even the mood in the room.

To ensure full coverage during parallel sessions of different working groups, it helps to have a second pair of hands supporting either on-site or remotely. While on-site participation is crucial to understand the fast-paced dynamics, which often involve last minute change of rooms and topics, team members can support the fieldwork from Vienna via the UN Web TV livestream, which shows some of the open negotiations in real time. Not everything is viewable online, so on-site negotiations still offer the best possible opportunity to engage in the field. But following the negotiations remotely still allows the team to dive deep into the fast-paced dynamic of finalising treaty language. 

Inside the whale.

At the United Nations Ocean Conference in Nice this June, alongside Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, and French President Emmanuel Macron, doctoral researcher Carolin Hirt went straight to the belly of the beast: the European Digital Ocean pavilion in the Green Zone, also known as La Baleine ('the Whale'). This unique space was designed to be an immersive installation, evoking the sensation of entering a whale. The pavilion showcased the EU's approach to ocean science, with a particular focus on the EU Digital Twin of the Ocean (EU DTO). 

Hirt's aim was to collect data on this site. However, the majority of the pavilion's presentations and panel discussions focused on the digital twin's technical capabilities and potential benefits, paying little attention to the challenges or political implications it entails, which is the focus of her research.

Deciding the future with virtual models

The Digital Twin of the Ocean lies at the core of Vadrot’s current ERC project TwinPolitics. The concept of "digital twins" can generally be understood as a realistic, real-time digital representation of a physical entity. While digital twins spread widely within manufacturing and product engineering in the 2000s, the possibilities for their usage have increased drastically due to increased computational power, numerical model development and AI. To capture this development, Vadrot coined the term "twin rush," describing how digital twins are increasingly leaving their sphere of origin and entering a highly political sphere by mirroring parts of the shared commons, like the ocean.

With many digital twin initiatives in the US, Europe and China lauding it as a way of making better and more scientifically sound decisions, the project investigates the making-of the EU DTO as well as the effects digital twins may have on environmental negotiation settings. It also inquires the equity of this development and whether or not countries of the Global South will be able to access and use Digital Twins of the Ocean.

Much ado ending in nothing.

This was the lesson doctoral researcher Felix Nütz learned at the negotiations on a Global Plastic Treaty in Geneva this summer. Opposition between ambitious states such as Rwanda, Panama, the EU, and Fiji, on the one side, and oil-producing states such as Saudi-Arabia, Russia, and Iran, on the other, resulted in a stalemate for almost the entire 10 days of negotiations. Many of the discussions lasted until 22:00, only to start again at 10:00 the next morning. 

Given that there were more than 3.000 participants at the venue, Nütz fostered collaboration with other researchers and civil society actors from all around the world. While even failed negotiations can give prescient insight into the way negotiations work, they can also lead to frustration and fatigue for the researcher. In this case, the strain was thankfully partly alleviated by the picturesque setting and congenial atmosphere among observers.

Keeping tabs on the frontlines of ocean diplomacy

These are challenging times. There is an eroding willingness of many great powers to enter multilateral negotiations. The consequences of pollution and over-exploitation are becoming more and more obvious. Studying international negotiations can both explain failure and show ways in which a more equitable and effective way of agreement-making is possible. 

At the heart of Vadrot's research interest and her team's fieldwork is the desire to ensure a better connection between science and politics and to decrease global inequalities. "Digital twins" as an emerging technology will factor into these processes and will have to be investigated further, in order to see if they can help bridge gaps between the Global North and the Global South or if they will reinforce inequalities. The team will keep an eye on the progress (and sometimes backlash) of plastic, deep sea mining and biodiversity negotiations- at least until 2029.