When Angelo Villagomez began working in ocean conservation in the late 2000s, it was not an inclusive field for him.
“My Indigenous identity was not necessarily welcomed,” says the Micronesian conservationist and marine policy expert. “I would have short hair, and I would dress in a tie and … try not to bring the Indigenous perspectives.”
Today, he is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC, focusing on Indigenous-led conservation.
In recent years, a growing number of academics, coastal communities and advocates have been pushing for ocean governance and protection to focus more on inclusivity, justice and fairness. And for the relevant authorities to listen to and respect voices beyond the people in western-style suits.
At international conferences, the attitude and agenda priorities are shifting along with the dress codes – at least on the surface.
The recent UN Ocean Conference saw some wins for the inclusion of Indigenous people and local representatives. “Indigenous” and “equity” were more commonly invoked in speeches; for the first time at a UN Ocean Conference, they were referenced in the UN secretary general’s opening remarks. Indigenous people were also prominent as speakers and attendees, although some felt they were not heard by the powerful.
Some of those pushing for change, who Dialogue Earth has spoken to since the meeting, worry that exclusion and injustice remain deeply embedded in ocean institutions. This comes at a time when governments are negotiating rules to open the deep sea bed for mining, alongside the rush to protect 30% of the ocean by 2030.
“They love when the Indigenous person sings for them, dances for them, prays for them, gives a land acknowledgement,” Villagomez says. “But they can be threatened by the Indigenous scientist or the Indigenous intellectual.”
Deep sea disagreements
For some communities, the ocean is a sacred place with ancestral and spiritual significance. Some Fijians believe their ancestors’ souls return to it when they die; in parts of Micronesia, end-of-life traditions involve burial at sea.
Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, a native Hawaiian elder widely known as Uncle Sol, said in a recent webinar: “In my genealogy of Oceania, it says that we are created from the deep ocean.” The webinar was hosted by Impossible Metals, a deep sea mining company. Uncle Sol told the hosts that perspectives like his are largely being ignored:
“None of this is given any consideration in the ISA [International Seabed Authority]. It becomes a challenge in trying to bring one’s cultural connection to the table … when they don’t even acknowledge that this is a part of our connection to the deep sea.”
Surabhi Ranganathan, an expert on international law at the University of Cambridge, England, says delegates from some countries at ISA negotiations have pushed for a narrow definition of cultural heritage. She says that instead of recognising living relationships with “the ocean itself”, they seek to limit heritage to tangible sites and objects – such as shipwrecks, human remains and artefacts.
Ranganathan believes this would make cultural heritage more legally manageable, and hence “more compatible with seabed mining”.
Debates over protecting intangible cultural heritage at the ISA continue. But Indigenous voices have already been sidelined, Ranganathan says, because calls from communities for a total ban on seabed mining have not been heeded:
“When it comes to an actual collision between what Indigenous people are demanding and what capitalistic interests are, you almost always see it’s the Indigenous interest that gets completely relativised.”
Historically imbalanced power
Exclusion and injustice at sea run a long way back. The ocean is intertwined with both modern and historical slave trading and wider colonialism.
Giulia Champion, who teaches critical ocean studies at the University of Southampton on England’s south coast, says historians found traces of this injustice in the British survey ship HMS Challenger. In the 1870s, the warship-turned research vessel embarked on a four-year voyage from England to South Africa, through the Antarctic circle to Australia and New Zealand, and on to Hong Kong, Fiji and more. The expedition is sometimes framed as the birth of modern marine research.
Harnessing the access and resources of the British empire, Challenger returned with measurements of marine temperature, depth, salinity and sediments, while collecting over 100,000 samples of animals and plants. Less discussed is how the voyage was rooted in British colonial ambitions and commercial interests, such as the expansion of the deep sea telegraph cable network.
“The ocean has always been this surface for Europe to expand [across] and exploit,” Champion says.
The critical contributions made by Indigenous and local communities, which the voyage often depended upon for navigation and specimen collection, were rarely recognised, she adds.
Champion and other academics argue this imbalanced power structure persists. They say it has been woven into the very fabric of international ocean law.
‘The law is part of the problem’
The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) sets out principles and rules for the use of the ocean, and procedures for states to resolve disputes.
Its most consequential feature is authorising coastal states to establish jurisdictional zones. They can control and exploit the natural resources in their “exclusive economic zone” (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles from their coast. This underpins fishing, oil and gas drilling and other extractive activities. By one estimate, around 90% of “harvestable resources” in the entire ocean are in EEZs.
Some see Unclos as a structure that reinforces colonial dynamics on the ocean, making it more easily exploitable by the economically powerful.
Even the depletion of fish driven by foreign fleets along West Africa’s coasts can be traced back to Unclos, according to Guy Standing, an economist at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. The law specifically requires coastal nations that cannot fully exploit their allowable catch to grant access to other states. This has led to industrial fleets from wealthier nations outcompeting locals in many areas, sometimes cited as a modern version of colonialism.
The ocean is not a lawless place, Ranganathan says, but it is still sinking into crises, including overfishing, oil spills and the deleterious impacts of climate change. She believes Unclos “is also part of the problem”.
Decolonising ocean protection
Even attempts to protect the ocean from extraction can intertwine with – and even cause – injustice.
In the late 2000s, Villagomez was one of those initiating and campaigning for a marine protected area around the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, which is located near his home in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific.
But the process of its creation was not entirely positive. Villagomez says pre-existing tensions and local feelings of injustice over being a US colony stirred locals’ scepticism toward the protection plan, which was officially proposed by the US federal government.
“Issues of colonisation were brought up immediately” with him by some of the community, Villagomez says. Tensions ran especially high after the Northern Mariana Islands lost its court case against the US federal government over who controls the former’s EEZs.
After these problems, a series of efforts to demonstrate strong support in local communities was initiated. Prominent opponents, such as the governor of the islands, eventually embraced the designation amidst mounting public backing. The federal government designated the Mariana Trench a Marine National Monument in 2009.
Scepticism has its roots in many cases of exclusion. Work by Villagomez found another US proposal to designate a national marine sanctuary in the Pacific Remote Islands area, announced in 2023, failed to consult the Indigenous communities who live closest to the region.
More than half of the 20 largest marine protected areas in the world are the territories of nations based somewhere else entirely, notes Villagomez. Local people in many such territories have traditionally had little say in decisions taken in capital cities on the other side of the globe. At the same time, these people are typically subjected to the worst impacts of the climate change and resource extraction that is being driven by the world’s large and wealthy nations.
“How do you create influence and power for these communities so that you can undo these inequities due to colonialism?” asks Villagomez. “You’re never really going to undo all of it. But how can you soften the blow?”
A good way to start, he says, is to move the control of science, conservation and management of these waters away from distant centres of power, and closer to the people who live there.
