Deep-sea Mining and the Pacific’s Question of Sovereignty

Olivia West, Shreya Maknoor & Caelan Doel

Image sourced from Dr Randi Rotjan via Wikimedia Commons

Deep-sea mining (DSM) divides the Pacific Islands. Forty-three countries have now signed a moratorium, eight of them Pacific Island states. Yet other island nations are among deep-sea mining’s most determined backers. At first glance, this may appear paradoxical: some of the states pushing hardest in favour of DSM are also the most scarred by historical extraction.

The apparent contradiction becomes clearer when the debate is viewed through a different lens. DSM is typically cast as a contest between environment and economy. But in the Pacific, a third dimension runs alongside both: sovereignty.

We suggest that a Pacific Island state’s stance on DSM might sometimes be shaped by how much sovereignty it still has to gain, or to assert. Where economic or political independence is still being sought, mining can look like leverage; where it is already secure, refusing costs less. For some Pacific states, the question is therefore not simply whether DSM is environmentally or economically desirable, but whether it offers an opportunity to exercise greater control over their own resources and political futures.

This lens does not necessarily make the practice safe or the promises real. Civil society groups and researchers warn that the economics are far from certain: sponsoring states may take on real liability for seabed activities while the promised revenues never fully materialise — a financial risk that is also a sovereignty risk. But the promise of independence and decisions made at home remains a powerful one, and it helps explain why the debate looks different across the region.

Micronesia: turning extraction’s legacy into leverage

For Naoero and Kiribati — two supporters of DSM — the history of extraction is violent and severe. For 70 years, starting in the 1900s, the British Phosphate Commission (jointly owned by Britain, Australia, and New Zealand) extracted more than 20 million tonnes of phosphate from Banaba, an island in Kiribati. The Commission removed around 90% of its surface, forcibly relocating the Banaban people to Fiji in 1945. Spectres of this extraction and subsequent alienation still haunt many descendants with horrors retold through traditions of oral storytelling.

The Commission’s activities in Naoero were similarly destructive. Roughly 80% of the island’s surface was stripped by phosphate mining, with the phosphate sold at below world prices to subsidise agriculture in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. Extensive mining activities transformed land use on Naoero, rendering mined-out areas inaccessible and unusable for agriculture and habitation.

Yet these histories have not deterred Naoeron and I-Kiribati policymakers from engaging with foreign DSM companies. For some, that history is precisely the point. DSM can be framed not as a repetition of colonial extraction, but as an opportunity to determine the terms of extraction themselves. Former Kiribati President Anote Tong put it this way: ‘If this pathway is not open to us because the values of the Global North are being projected upon us, then… Pacific island nations must be duly compensated for not mining.’ At the United Nations, Naoero’s President David Adeang struck a similar note of self-reliance, casting the seabed’s minerals not as a matter of dependence but of agency: ‘The greatest risk we face is not the potential environmental impacts of mineral recovery but the risk of inaction… This is not just an economic opportunity; it is an environmental imperative.’

These positions reveal an important distinction. For states with histories of externally controlled resource extraction, sovereignty may not mean rejecting mining altogether. It can instead mean having greater control over whether, how and by whom resources are extracted — and who ultimately benefits.

Polynesia: resource sovereignty and self-determination

Similar reasoning appears in Polynesia, in territories without full independence. In Maohi Nui (French Polynesia), still governed as a French overseas territory, a split in the pro-independence party Tavini has surfaced the tension: more assertive independence members back DSM as a revenue source that could hasten sovereignty, while those favouring a slower path oppose it on environmental grounds.

A similar tension is visible in the Cook Islands, where the governing, more pro-nationalist Cook Islands Party strongly supports DSM. Prime Minister Mark Brown has insisted that any new agreement that the Cook Islands enters with New Zealand must acknowledge that the Cook Islands is now ‘more independent’. Some Cook Islands politicians believe they can assert this independent identity through DSM. Brown frames a ‘sovereign approach’ to deep-sea mining as part of how the Cook Islands can become a ‘leader and steward in a sustainable minerals future’. Keeping with this approach, the Cook Islands have granted themselves the license with the largest funding and area, albeit in collaboration with overseas consortium members.  

The Cook Islands case demonstrates why sovereignty in the Pacific cannot be reduced to a binary distinction between independent and non-independent states. Sovereignty is also exercised through economic choices, resource governance and the ability to negotiate with larger powers on more equal terms.

Melanesia: the flip side

By contrast, the Melanesian Spearhead Group has taken a broadly anti-DSM position, though its members have their own experiences of foreign extraction, particularly in the colonial metals mining of Fiji and Papua New Guinea (and New Caledonia, which remains both a French territory and the world’s fourth-largest nickel producer). But these are also among the region’s more economically diversified and least aid-dependent states, with existing revenue from agriculture, forestry, fishing and land-based minerals. And uniquely, much of the land in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, and the Solomon Islands has remained indigenously owned. For these states, the seabed is therefore not necessarily the only pathway to economic self-reliance or resource sovereignty. The political calculation is different: when alternative sources of economic agency already exist, the environmental and financial risks of DSM may be harder to justify. This suggests that opposition to DSM can itself be understood as an expression of sovereignty. Choosing not to extract can be just as much an assertion of control over natural resources as choosing to extract them.

The pattern is far from a rule. Several less autonomous jurisdictions — among them Guam, the Northern Marianas, Hawaii and Palau — have called for or legislated DSM moratoriums, cutting against any simple and universal link between independence and opposition. But it is an often-overlooked dimension of the DSM debate which has an important place in the wider conversation.

The sovereign choice beneath the waves

So the question running through the Pacific is not only one of environmental risk and economic promise, but also of who gets to decide, what benefits and on what terms. On the seabed, as on land before it, that answer varies from one nation to the next, shaped in no small part by how much political, economic, and resource sovereignty each still has to consolidate.

Understanding DSM through the lens of sovereignty does not resolve the environmental debate. It does, however, challenge the assumption that Pacific states are divided simply between those prioritising economic development and those prioritising environmental protection. Their choices are also shaped by a deeper question: what does sovereignty mean in a region still negotiating the legacy of colonialism, dependence and external influence?

Olivia is studying a Bachelor of International Security Studies at the Australian National University, majoring in History. She is interested in international security and relations, modern and contemporary history, and geopolitics.

Shreya is studying a Bachelor of Laws (Honours)/Bachelor of International Security Studies at the Australian National University and is a Project Assistant at the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research. She has expertise in international relations, energy security, and climate change spaces.

Caelan is in her final semester of a Bachelor of International Relations/Bachelor of Arts at the Australian National University, with an exchange program at the University of Edinburgh. She is interested in international security, human rights, and environment. The Pacific region is a new area of focus.

This article is the product of a small research project cataloguing resource extraction across the Pacific Islands region.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Young Australians in International Affairs. All content is original, and no plagiarism has been used in the preparation of this article.