Political will is needed to address the impacts of climate change on ocean ecological security. Yet it is rarely studied and is often described as an invisible force and a ‘black box’ that yields unpredictable policy outcomes. Despite this ambiguity, public policy scholars have argued political will is an empirically useful concept that can be observed and analysed.
Political will is dynamic and produced collectively among decision makers working within political and institutional contexts. An operational definition of political will provides a starting point for analysis: a sufficient set of decision makers, with a common understanding of a particular problem on the formal agenda, who are committed to supporting a commonly perceived, potentially effective policy solution (Post, Raile and Raile, 2010). However, this definition does not account for the role of negotiation, which is central to how decision makers align interests and policy preferences, including who is at the table, how problems are framed, the solutions identified and the commitments reached.
The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement offers an illustrative case. The Agreement was adopted by consensus in June 2023, after nearly two decades of discussion, establishing legal obligations for nations to protect and conserve marine biodiversity on the High Seas, including by building ecosystem resilience to climate change. This paper asks how the political will to conclude the Agreement was mobilised among decision makers. The illustration draws on the Agreement text, the documentary record of the Intergovernmental Conference sessions held between 2018 and 2023, and articles tracing the negotiation process.
This paper argues that negotiation offers a novel way into the black box. Incorporating negotiation factors into analysis and testing this approach on empirical cases would enable a deeper understanding of how political will can be mobilised for ocean ecological security in a time of climate change.
