(First in a three-part series on pathways for Computational Law in the implementation of the BBNJ Clearing-House Mechanism)

At the recent COP30 in Brazil, the annual gathering where countries and interested parties meet annually to review progress, negotiate new targets, and take decisions to combat climate change, Indigenous representatives protested outside the Blue Zone, the restricted area where all official decisions are made. Their message was simple: they were tired of waiting at the door of international law while their knowledge walked freely inside. The irony was unmistakable: their expertise on marine ecosystems was welcomed inside; they were not. 

Welcome to international law’s Berghain problem. Berghain is Berlin’s most mythologised nightclub: long queues, high expectations, and absolute discretion resting with a single bouncer whose criteria for letting people in remain opaque and non-negotiable. The comparison illuminates how power operates in international environmental governance. Both systems concentrate discretion in gatekeepers who answer to no one, and treat exclusion as an inherent feature rather than a problem. A nightclub protecting an exclusive experience can survive this way. A planet in environmental crisis cannot.

In international negotiations, Indigenous Peoples repeatedly find themselves waiting to be admitted. States consult them, invite them to side-events, and grant them brief speaking time, but decision-making spaces remain controlled by those already in power. International law enshrines free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) as a principle, yet FPIC too often serves as a consultation ritual rather than a genuine transfer of authority. Indigenous Peoples’ representatives can inform and advise, but structural authority to shape, veto, or redirect governance stays concentrated in state hands. Even when admitted, they enter spaces already structured by rules, hierarchies, and protocols they cannot modify. The architecture encodes power dynamics: Indigenous Peoples arrive as guests in houses built by others, governed by rules they did not write. 

Participation matters beyond symbolism. From rainforest pharmaceuticals to crop genetics, from traditional climate adaptation to biodiversity conservation, Indigenous territories contain 80% of the world’s biodiversity. Indigenous knowledge systems have documented everything from medicinal compounds now worth billions in pharmaceuticals to climate patterns that inform adaptation strategies. Yet when this knowledge transforms into patents, policies, or climate finance mechanisms, Indigenous Peoples watch from outside while others decide how their generations of stewardship will be used.

Here is where the paradox gets perverse: At Berghain, the bouncer guards the interior; in environmental governance, the logic inverts. States document, extract, and circulate traditional knowledge with minimal safeguards and few mechanisms to ensure Indigenous Peoples’ authority. International institutions demand knowledge critical for planetary survival yet deny co-authorship in spaces where that knowledge informs policy. Knowledge flows out freely into scientific databases and policy frameworks, while those who generated and contextualised it across generations remain outside the rooms where its application is decided. Centralised gatekeeping concentrates power at thresholds while enabling uncontrolled extraction.

This pattern repeats across environmental forums: the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization). Each promises inclusion while maintaining the same architecture of exclusion. This raises critical questions for computational law and legal informatics: will digital platforms for environmental governance reproduce gatekeeping logic in technical forms, or can they enable genuinely distributed authority? What if we could design systems differently? What if the bouncer was not necessary?

From Bouncer Logic to Polycentric Architecture

At the CodeX Blockchain Group, a major focus of our research and gatherings has been how computational law and blockchain infrastructures can be applied towards public goods and common-pool resource management, particularly with regards to planetary health and ecological transition.

Elinor Ostrom’s research on common-pool resource management demonstrated that sustainable governance requires distributed decision-making, with local communities, Indigenous Peoples institutions, and state actors operating as interdependent nodes within larger polycentric systems. Each node exercises genuine authority within its domain while remaining accountable through mutual monitoring, information-sharing, and coordinated action. Indigenous Peoples’ institutions function not as peripheral consultants but as essential governance centres with legitimacy, jurisdictional authority, and ecological expertise developed through generations. If Berghain operates through one bouncer, one door, one logic, polycentric governance functions in the opposite way: multiple entry points, plural knowledge systems, distributed authority. Think Wikipedia instead of Encyclopaedia Britannica; many editors, many viewpoints, shared authority. Legitimacy flows from ecological relationships and demonstrated capacity to sustain ecosystems, not institutional hierarchy.

This is not romanticism. Decades of empirical research document that Indigenous Peoples with secure decision-making authority consistently outperform centralised state management on biodiversity conservation and ecosystem health metrics. What remains lacking is the political will to redistribute authority. Polycentric systems may appear chaotic to observers accustomed to hierarchical structures, yet they prove more successful precisely because they enable mutual monitoring, rapid adaptation, and integration of local knowledge. What appears to be fragmentation is actually resilience through distributed authority. No single point of failure exists because no single point of control exists.

Digital Decentralisation as Technical Parallel

Consider how email works: no single company controls it, yet anyone can send messages to anyone else. Blockchain networks and distributed ledger technologies operate on a similar principle, demonstrating that authority need not concentrate in a single node to function effectively. In these decentralised architectures, there is no single bouncer; instead many may operate according to transparent protocols rather than opaque discretion. Decision-making is distributed among participating actors, with control shared in accordance with predefined rules that all participants can verify and audit. No central authority decides who participates or what constitutes a legitimate contribution. The protocol itself, visible and collectively modifiable (just as Wikipedia’s rules are visible and changeable by the community), determines these questions. Trust emerges from transparency and the ability to verify that others have followed, and continue to follow, agreed-upon rules.

The structural parallel proves instructive. Digital decentralisation challenges the monopolistic control of centralised platforms, extracting user data while concentrating decision-making in corporate hands. Polycentric environmental governance challenges the monopolistic control of state-centric international law, extracting traditional knowledge while concentrating decision-making in diplomatic negotiations. Both recognise that resilience, legitimacy, and effectiveness emerge from distributing rather than concentrating authority. Both require infrastructure that enables rather than gatekeeps participation. Technical architecture either reinforces or challenges existing power relationships.

A centralised platform with single administrators controlling access and determining valid data reproduces the bouncer problem digitally. A distributed network where nodes control their own data and participate as equals offers an alternative. This is where the Agreement on Marine Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement) clearing-house mechanism (CHM) becomes significant. If designed as a decentralised infrastructure rather than a digital repository controlled by a central secretariat, it could operationalize polycentric governance, enabling Indigenous Peoples, local communities, scientists, and states to interact as co-equal nodes. The conditional verb “could” matters. Legal text creates possibility, not inevitability. Everything depends on implementation choices, specifically, whether designers focus less on platform sophistication but on gathering their political will to design systems where governance is genuinely distributed rather than efficiently concentrated.

The BBNJ Test Case: Architecture as Politics

The question is: why do systems relying on Indigenous stewardship continue operating like Berghain? And what does building something different require? The nightclub metaphor captures how power operates: gatekeepers answering to no one, opaque criteria, and exclusion as an inherent feature. 

The BBNJ Agreement offers a critical test case. Implementation will reveal whether states design systems that distribute authority or install new bouncers with better credentials and sophisticated digital interfaces that mask unchanged relationships. For legal informatics, the stakes are clear: technical architecture either challenges or reproduces existing power dynamics. The CHM will function as distributed governance, where nodes exercise genuine authority, or become another extraction mechanism that concentrates control in traditional state hands. The choice is political, not technical. It determines whether legal information systems serve planetary resilience or digitize exclusion with better bandwidth. As we will see in the next essay, the BBNJ Agreement’s institutional design reveals exactly how bouncer problems migrate from physical doors to digital platforms through the seemingly neutral language of ‘appropriate qualifications’.

In January 2026, the BBNJ Agreement is scheduled to enter into force. By then, the CHM’s architecture will be set. Will it be Wikipedia or Facebook? A network or a nightclub? The technical specifications being written now will determine whether Indigenous Peoples finally get past the bouncer, or whether the gatekeepers just get better suits.

Our thanks also to Rik Smith-Unna, Dimitri De Jonghe, and other members of the BBNJ Equitable Oceans team, for reviewing and contributing to this piece and series on the BBNJ Agreement.

Authors:

Júlia Schütz Veiga (The Nippon Foundation Ocean Voices Programme, University of Edinburgh)
Tony Lai (CodeX Stanford)
Henrique Marcos (Faculty of Law, University of Maastricht)