"Reimagining Resource Governance: Transaction Cost Management and the BBNJ Agreement"

This thesis contends that public governance institutions, established by international law, can incentivise cooperation in the administration of natural resources by focusing on the governance of transactions and managing organisational costs. This perspective challenges the approach taken by most international instruments concerning environmental law and the law of the sea, which typically emphasise global governance through mitigating negative externalities. The work establishes a dialogue between transaction cost theories and the function of legal institutions in managing the transaction costs that arise from incomplete “contracts” in the form of multilateral treaties. The primary analytical framework is grounded in the recently adopted Agreement on Biological Diversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (“BBNJ Agreement”) and its institutional design and regulatory framework concerning activities related to marine genetic resources and digital sequence information. It is posited that the regulatory framework established under the BBNJ Agreement represents an alternative economic model to the predominant market-oriented approach to resource governance in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The proactive governance of transactions has implications for various economic activities reliant on the extraction of interdependent resources, particularly in fishing and deep-seabed mining. Ultimately, it remains uncertain whether the BBNJ Agreement fully addresses all transaction-cost-related challenges posed by other stakeholders while fulfilling its primary function as an organisational coordination institution.