By Dr. Nirmal Jivan Shah
“The BBNJ Agreement promises stronger protection for the high seas. For Seychelles, its success will depend on something much closer to home: whether a small island state has the capacity to translate international ambition into durable national action.”
Seychelles ratified the Agreement on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) on 13 April 2024, and it entered into force on 17 January 2026 (United Nations, n.d.). As a sprawling archipelago of small islands in the Western Indian Ocean the Seychelles values this Agreement. Ratification, however, is only the beginning. Implementation requires national institutions that can take on new responsibilities without weakening the environmental and development work they already carry.
This is the central challenge for a small island state. International environmental governance is becoming more demanding at the same time that many small states face demographic and health challenges, tight markets, limited technical depth and increasing pressure on public finance. The success of BBNJ will therefore depend not only on the quality of the Agreement, but on whether countries such as Seychelles can sustain the national machinery required to make it work.
Capacity is more than training
“Capacity building” is one of the most familiar expressions in international environmental policy, but it is often understood as training. Training is valuable, but a workshop does not create a larger workforce or institutional budgets. Lasting capability depends on experienced people, clear responsibilities, functioning systems, adequate operating budgets and enough continuity for knowledge to remain in the country after individual projects and consultancies have ended.
Seychelles already operates within significant human-resource constraints. Population ageing, high incidences of heroine addiction and non-communicable diseases, skill mismatch and high labor force participation affect recruitment nationally (World Bank, 2026a). The Marine Spatial Plan capacity study identified staffing shortages, turnover and coordination difficulties (Oceanogami, 2025). Research on island conservation has documented management and leadership barriers, while recent work on coastal adaptation in Seychelles has highlighted continuing human-resource and financing constraints (Burt, Nuno and Bunbury, 2022; Burt et al., 2023; Weishaupt et al., 2026).
These limitations have consequences for conservation itself. Gill et al. (2017) showed that staffing and budgets affect the ecological performance of marine protected areas. Ward-Paige et al. (2026), in a recent preprint, estimate the global MPA workforce at about 100,000 and suggest that effective management of existing MPAs would require roughly twice that number. The estimate may be refined, but the underlying point is unlikely to change: environmental commitments are only as effective as the people available to carry them out.
International obligations have domestic costs
Capacity is not only about the visible work of conservation. International agreements also generate a substantial layer of less visible activity: monitoring, reporting, legal interpretation, data management, consultation, coordination and participation in international processes. Each requires skilled staff, institutional attention and recurrent expenditure. Time is also a scarce resource, seldom quantified but often a critical constraint on effective implementation.
Jarvis et al. (2026), drawing on experience from Seychelles and other Small Island Developing States, show how the monitoring requirements of the Kunming-Montréal Global Biodiversity Framework can become another inadequately funded obligation. BBNJ will create its own administrative and technical demands, many of them falling on the same limited pool of people already working on conservation, fisheries, biodiversity and environmental management.
These responsibilities also arrive in an already demanding financial environment. Bohorquez (2024) modelled an additional annual requirement of US$10–42 million for Seychelles’ MPA network alone. The World Bank (2026b) separately identified US$810 million in climate and development investment requirements over 25 years, while the IMF (2024) has highlighted wider challenges related to financing and project sustainability. These figures measure different things and should not be combined, but together they make an important point: BBNJ implementation will take place alongside substantial existing demands on national resources.
Cost the obligation, not the grant
That makes rigorous costing essential. Seychelles should first determine what each BBNJ responsibility will actually cost to fulfil properly and only then compare that requirement with the funding available. Otherwise, implementation risks being designed around the size of a donor grant rather than around what the obligation genuinely requires.
A realistic budget must include more than equipment and consultancies. Staff time, specialist advice, legal work, information systems, reporting, maintenance and any necessary monitoring or surveillance are all part of the cost. It must also distinguish one-off establishment costs from recurrent expenditure that will continue long after a project ends.
Hollaway et al. (2026) argue for resource mobilisation based on assessed needs under BBNJ. The same principle should guide national implementation: cost the obligation, not the grant. The Agreement provides for capacity-building based on national needs and for additional, predictable financial resources, but it does not guarantee Seychelles a particular allocation (United Nations, 2023). A system that functions only for as long as an external grant pays for it cannot be regarded as sustainable national capability.
National capability is not national self-sufficiency
Recognising these constraints does not mean that Seychelles must reproduce every specialised technical function domestically. For a small state, that would often be inefficient and prohibitively expensive. The more important objective is to retain enough national knowledge and authority to understand the issues, evaluate external advice and make informed decisions.
Marine genetic resources illustrate the point. Seychelles needs the legal and scientific competence to understand its rights and obligations, but highly specialised laboratory or bioinformatics services can be accessed through partnerships. Environmental impact assessment can follow a similar model, with national authorities retaining decision-making responsibility while drawing on independent expertise where necessary. Seychelles’ own experience with weaknesses in national environmental assessment, including those reflected in the Assomption Commission of Inquiry, should inform how such arrangements are designed and supported.
Monitoring and surveillance require the same pragmatism. Article 25 recognises the risk of imposing disproportionate burdens on Small Island Developing States (United Nations, 2023). Seychelles should not assume that implementing BBNJ means independently patrolling vast areas of the high seas. Regional cooperation, satellite monitoring and shared services may offer more realistic approaches, provided their reliability and recurrent costs are properly understood.
National capability should not be equated solely with government capacity either. NGOs, universities and regional institutions can provide expertise and implementation support under properly funded and clearly defined arrangements. The objective should be a national system in which government retains authority, oversight and institutional memory while drawing intelligently on specialist capability wherever it exists.
The real test
Seychelles has every reason to support stronger governance of biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction, but international ambition must be matched by domestic capability.
The real test of BBNJ will not be the number of workshops held, consultants recruited or reports produced. It will be whether Seychelles can meet its international responsibilities while retaining the skilled people, financial resources and institutional strength required to manage its own environment effectively.
For a small island state, that is the difference between participation and capability. BBNJ should strengthen the institutions on which Seychelles’ environmental future depends, not place additional responsibilities on organisations that are already stretched. If implementation is designed with that principle in mind, Seychelles can contribute meaningfully to the governance of the global ocean without weakening its ability to care for the ocean within its own jurisdiction.
The lesson extends well beyond BBNJ. Every international obligation must ultimately be implemented by national institutions, and for small island states the constraints of scale, workforce and finance are structural realities rather than temporary inconveniences. Recognising those limits is not an argument for lower ambition or weaker commitments. It is an argument for designing obligations, financing arrangements and support systems that make implementation possible and sustainable. International agreements are strongest when the responsibilities they create are matched by the capabilities of the countries expected to carry them. For Seychelles and other SIDS, realism about national limits is therefore not a retreat from ambition, it is what gives ambition a chance of succeeding.
References
Bohorquez, J. (2024). Updating costing and financing options to implement the Seychelles Marine Spatial Plan. Report prepared for the Ministry of Agriculture, Climate Change and Environment. Seychelles Marine Spatial Plan Initiative.
Burt, A. J., Nuno, A., and Bunbury, N. (2022). Defining and bridging the barriers to more effective conservation of island ecosystems: A practitioner’s perspective. Conservation Science and Practice, 4(1), e587.
Burt, A., Nuno, A., Turnbull, L., Fleischer-Dogley, F., and Bunbury, N. (2023). An international assessment of the barriers influencing the effectiveness of island ecosystem management. People and Nature, 5(1), 134–146.
Gill, D. A., et al. (2017). Capacity shortfalls hinder the performance of marine protected areas globally. Nature, 543, 665–669.
Hollaway, L., Belonje, E., Burger, B., Pouponneau, A., Bezabih, M., and Northrop, E. (2026). Grounding the BBNJ agreement’s resource mobilization goal: Cost benchmarks and the case for needs-based funding. Frontiers in Marine Science, 13, 1773862.
International Monetary Fund (2024). Seychelles: 2024 Article IV Consultation and second reviews under the Extended Fund Facility and Resilience and Sustainability Facility arrangements. IMF Country Report No. 24/191.
Jarvis, A., Jeffery Brown, H., Dias, A., Edmund, J. K., Gamatis, I., St.Louis, A., and McGowan, P. J. K. (2026). Challenges for Small Island Developing States in meeting monitoring requirements of the Kunming-Montréal global biodiversity framework. Conservation Science and Practice, 8(8), e70348.
Oceanogami (2025). Capacity needs assessment and capacity development plan for Seychelles MSP. Final report, January 2025.
United Nations (2023). Agreement under UNCLOS on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement). Adopted 19 June 2023.
United Nations (n.d.). United Nations Treaty Collection: BBNJ Agreement status. Depositary record. Accessed 19 September 2026.
Ward-Paige, C. A., Courtiol, A., Appleton, M. R., Noori, L., Sullivan-Wiley, K., Katz, L., and Pike, E. P. (2026). Mind the gap: A critical 40-fold workforce shortfall for protecting 30% of the ocean. EcoEvoRxiv, version 1, 18 June 2026. Preprint; not peer reviewed.
Weishaupt, J., Kuhn, A., Baatz, C., and Vafeidis, A. T. (2026). Stakeholder preferences and perceived effectiveness of coastal adaptation measures in Seychelles. npj Climate Action, 5, 16.
World Bank (2026a). Modernize, utilize, digitalize: How to raise productivity to deliver growth, good jobs, and social mobility in Seychelles. Official summary of the Seychelles Country Growth and Jobs Report, 17 September 2026.
World Bank (2026b). Smart, resilient investments key to jobs and growth in Seychelles, new World Bank Group report finds. Official account of the Seychelles Country Climate and Development Report, 27 March 2026.