Beyond royalties: a multidimensional equity framework for deep-seabed mining under the common heritage of humankind

Debate over benefit-sharing from deep-seabed mining has concentrated on how much contractors should pay and how future revenue should be divided among states. This focus leaves a prior governance problem unresolved: how does value derived from a common-heritage resource become an equitable public benefit rather than revenue absorbed by administration, environmental liabilities, or weak delivery systems? This article addresses that question through a directed qualitative analysis of 24 legal, negotiating, financial, and policy documents, centred on the International Seabed Authority’s 2018–2026 work and tested against three external developments: the unfinished outcome of its thirty-first session, the United States’ accelerated unilateral licensing pathway, and the entry into force of the agreement on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. The analysis finds a recurrent institutional fragmentation. Collection rules, environmental payments, distribution options, non-monetary benefits, and accountability are developed in adjacent tracks without an operative rule linking them. It also finds sustained attention to distribution alongside uneven treatment of recognition, intergenerational design, ecological correction, and end-to-end public accountability. A six-stage benefit-conversion chain is therefore proposed: value capture, legal classification, environmental ring-fencing, allocation, delivery, and public accountability. The framework distinguishes royalties from environmental and administrative payments, combines a guaranteed formula-based floor with needs-sensitive programmes, subjects non-monetary benefits to additionality and verification, and makes adoption of minimum benefit-sharing rules a gateway to commercial production. Equity, on this account, is not an allocation formula applied after revenue appears. It is a property of the whole institutional process by which common-heritage value is authorised, converted, delivered, and reviewed.