THE DEEP BRIEF · ISSUE 05
Small Island States and the Institutions That Speak Over Them
"Power is exercised rather than possessed."
— Michel Foucault
The Distance Between Jurisdiction and Influence
There is a particular paradox at the heart of contemporary ocean governance. The states most dependent on the ocean, most exposed to the consequences of its mismanagement, and in many cases legally entitled to govern vast maritime spaces are not necessarily the states best positioned to shape the institutions that govern those spaces.
This is not primarily a story about vulnerability. Nor is it a story about exclusion. Small island developing states participate throughout the architecture of ocean governance. They sit within the International Maritime Organization, the International Seabed Authority, regional fisheries bodies, and increasingly within the institutional framework emerging around the BBNJ Agreement. They negotiate, vote, coordinate, and in some cases have reshaped the development of international law itself.
The paradox lies elsewhere. Over the past four decades, the law of the sea redistributed jurisdiction across the ocean on a scale unprecedented in modern international law. Through the exclusive economic zone, states with modest land territories acquired sovereign rights over maritime spaces that dwarf their terrestrial footprint. Yet while jurisdiction expanded, the capacity required to exercise influence within the institutions governing that jurisdiction remained distributed much as it had before.
The result is one of the defining tensions in contemporary ocean governance: the distance between legal entitlement and institutional influence.
The Ocean States
UNCLOS transformed the legal geography of the ocean. For many SIDS, the exclusive economic zone was not merely an additional maritime entitlement. It was a fundamental redefinition of the state itself. Kiribati, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Barbados and others became custodians of ocean spaces vastly larger than their land territory.
The Large Ocean State concept emerged from this reality. It reflects a simple but consequential observation: many island states are not small when measured through the maritime jurisdictions they administer. They are ocean states whose political and economic futures are inseparable from the condition of the sea.
The achievement of UNCLOS was therefore extraordinary. It redistributed ocean space. The unresolved question is whether the institutions governing that space evolved accordingly.
How Institutions Allocate Influence
International institutions rarely distribute influence solely through legal equality. Influence is exercised through presence, expertise, continuity, committee representation, drafting authority, financing, and institutional memory.
States able to maintain specialised delegations, participate continuously in technical meetings, review extensive documentation, and shape negotiating texts enjoy advantages that formal voting rights alone cannot replicate.
This reality is not unique to ocean governance. It is a characteristic of multilateral institutions generally. The distinction matters because it explains why legal rights and practical influence frequently diverge. Equal membership does not automatically produce equal participation, and equal participation does not automatically produce equal influence.
Inside the Institutions
The International Seabed Authority illustrates the challenge clearly. The ISA’s Assembly includes all parties, but meaningful engagement with the development of the Mining Code requires sustained technical participation. Major industrial powers and contractors maintain teams of specialists. Many SIDS must cover the ISA alongside climate negotiations, fisheries governance, BBNJ implementation, and the wider UN calendar.
The BBNJ process revealed both the possibilities and limits of SIDS influence. Caribbean and Pacific states played an outsized role in shaping benefit-sharing provisions, capacity-building commitments, and equity mechanisms. Yet implementation introduces a different reality. Governance increasingly shifts toward committees, technical bodies, funding mechanisms, and administrative processes where resource asymmetries re-emerge.
The IMO presents a similar pattern. Decisions affecting shipping, emissions, safety, and routing measures carry profound implications for ocean-dependent states. Yet deliberations are frequently shaped by major flag states, major port states, and industry actors with the resources to sustain permanent engagement.
When SIDS Shape Outcomes
To focus only on asymmetry would miss an important part of the story. The history of ocean governance contains numerous examples of SIDS exercising influence disproportionate to their size.
AOSIS played a central role in preserving the 1.5-degree temperature goal within the climate regime. During the BBNJ negotiations, SIDS coalitions helped shape provisions on marine genetic resources, capacity-building, and technology transfer. Pacific states have also been among the most persistent voices calling for precaution in relation to deep seabed mining.
Capacity asymmetries are not destiny. Influence can emerge through coalition discipline, procedural expertise, moral legitimacy, and sustained diplomatic coordination. But these examples also reveal a pattern: SIDS often achieve their greatest success during negotiations. The greater challenge begins once implementation starts.
The Capacity Problem
The central problem confronting many SIDS is not formal representation. It is the capacity required to convert representation into sustained influence.
Delegations remain small. Technical expertise is expensive. Scientific infrastructure is unevenly distributed. Participation in simultaneous governance processes often exceeds available resources. The result is a recurring pattern in which states possess substantial legal interests in ocean outcomes while lacking the institutional bandwidth necessary to shape every stage of the decision-making process.
This challenge is visible in debates over financing, committee composition, participation support, and technical assistance. It is also visible in efforts to advance the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index, which seeks to better capture the structural realities confronting many island states.
What to Watch
Three developments will help determine whether the dynamics examined here are beginning to shift.
First, BBNJ COP1 in 2027 will test whether equity commitments survive translation into operational rules, financing arrangements, and institutional practice.
Second, debates within the ISA concerning the future of deep seabed mining will continue to reveal the relationship between technical capacity, commercial interests, and environmental governance.
Third, implementation of the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS will provide an important indication of whether commitments relating to participation, ocean governance, and institutional support are producing measurable change.
Conclusion
For four decades, international law has expanded the jurisdictional reach of many island states. The achievement was historic. Through UNCLOS, ocean space was redistributed on a scale previously unimaginable.
The unresolved challenge is whether governance institutions evolve to reflect that redistribution.
The future contest in ocean governance is no longer primarily about who possesses legal rights over maritime space. Increasingly, it concerns who possesses the capacity to exercise influence within the institutions that govern it.
The loudest silence in ocean governance may not be the absence of SIDS from the room. It may be the distance between being present and being heard.
Further Reading
Academic & Scholarly
Governing the Commons — Elinor Ostrom
The foundational text on collective resource management; essential background for understanding why ocean governance institutions succeed or fail at the structural level.
The World Ocean in Globalisation — Davor Vidas & Peter Johan Schei
A rigorous edited volume examining how globalisation has reshaped the legal and political frameworks governing ocean space — particularly relevant to the institutional dynamics examined in this issue.
Commons, Commerce and Conservation — Rosemary Rayfuse & Robin Warner
Focuses on the tension between commercial exploitation and conservation in areas beyond national jurisdiction; directly relevant to the capacity asymmetries this issue explores.
Primary Sources
UNCLOS Parts V and XI
The treaty provisions establishing the exclusive economic zone and the deep seabed regime — the foundational legal architecture underpinning the jurisdictional redistribution discussed throughout this issue.
Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS)
The current international framework for SIDS development commitments; the implementation record of its ocean governance provisions will be a key indicator of whether rhetoric is translating into institutional change.
AOSIS Leaders’ Declaration on the Special Circumstances of Small Island Developing States (2025)
Adopted at the 80th UNGA session, this declaration asserts the special circumstances of SIDS as a principle of international law and directly confronts the gap between formal recognition and operational reality across multilateral governance processes — precisely the institutional distance this issue examines.
Literary & General Nonfiction
We Are the Ocean — Epeli Hauʻofa
The essential counter-narrative to the “small island” framing — Hauʻofa recentres Pacific peoples as ocean civilisations whose relationship to the sea predates and exceeds any jurisdictional category.
The Life and Death of States — Natasha Wheatley
A searching examination of how statehood is constituted and contested over time; illuminates the deeper questions about sovereignty and institutional recognition that underlie this issue’s central argument.
Global South Perspectives
Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change — Sumudu Atapattu
Brings a Global South legal perspective to the intersection of climate vulnerability and international law; grounds the abstract institutional analysis of this issue in the lived stakes for island communities.
Globalized, Climatized, Stigmatized — Camillo Gonsalves
Essays by a former Minister of Finance and former Permanent Representative of St. Vincent and the Grenadines to the United Nations; a rigorous analysis of how globalisation, climate change, and financial blacklisting combine to constrain small island development — with the SIDS experience as the unit of analysis throughout.
Next Issue
The Deep Brief — Issue 06
When Science Speaks, Who Listens? — The World Ocean Assessment and the Limits of Evidence Without Obligation