A matter of time: the impacts of Covid-19 on marine biodiversity negotiations

Like many other global environmental meetings, the in-person negotiations for a new legally binding instrument to conserve and sustainably use marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) were disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic and its lockdowns. In the BBNJ case, both state and non-state actors initiated several types of digital dialogue and virtual negotiation ‘sites’ to continue multilateral relations over a period of two years. To explore the impact of what we call a ‘digital turn’ in multilateral environmental agreement-making, we adapted methodologies that we had used in the past to study in-person negotiations by conducting two online surveys and digital critical policy ethnography. Two overarching questions guided our research: how did the negotiations turn digital and what were the impacts of this digital turn? We explore impacts at several levels and discuss them in relation to three dimensions of time: time as speed, as period, and as momentum. Our findings indicate that, firstly, non-state actors participated more actively in online formats to keep up the pace of the negotiations; secondly, individuals perceived the additional period of time — during which they could only communicate online while ‘waiting’ for the in-person negotiation to resume —as a negative but commonly experienced period and finally, the online formats ensured the momentum throughout the Covid-19 crisis — thus preventing a failure of the overall negotiation process