Everyone in the Tent: How Ocean Treaties Actually Get Made

Most people picture ocean conservation as scientists on research vessels or advocates holding up protest signs. Holly Koehler spent almost thirty years in a very different setting: windowless UN meeting rooms in New York, offices at the FAO in Rome, and what she calls "oftentimes very boring hotel ballrooms around the world." That's where the actual agreements get made. Koehler is the Vice President of Policy and Outreach at the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF), and before that she spent thirteen years at the U.S. State Department's Office of Marine Conservation, engaged in international fisheries negotiations regionally in the Pacific and globally at the UN and FAO.

From a Sea Turtle Internship to Thirty Years of Tuna Policy

Her path into that world started sideways. In grad school, working on a public affairs degree at Indiana University, she chose a summer internship over writing another term paper. That internship, with the NGO now known as Ocean Conservancy, placed her on a sea turtle project, and sea turtles taught her the idea her whole career would be built on: migratory species don't read maps. They cross flag-state boundaries, run into different gear and different vessels, and no single country can manage them alone. The only real answer is international cooperation, and that internship put her in the same rooms as State Department negotiators almost by accident.

What Is an RFMO, and Why Does Listening Matter More Than Law?

That question, how do you manage something that ignores every border, is the reason Regional Fisheries Management Organizations (RFMOs) exist. An RFMO is a treaty-based body: countries with a stake in a given fishery legally bind themselves to cooperate on how it's managed, under a framework that traces back to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and the UN Fish Stocks Agreement. Nearly the entire ocean is already covered by one, in bodies like ICCAT in the Atlantic or the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, some with more than forty member countries. And when Andrew asked Koehler what skill has mattered most across three decades of negotiating in those rooms, her answer wasn't legal expertise. It was listening, specifically listening for what a country means behind what it actually says, because "where you stand depends on where you sit."

The Thanksgiving All-Nighter That Passed Resolution 61/105

That skill is what made one of her most memorable career moments possible. While chairing the UN's sustainable fisheries resolution negotiations, Koehler and her fellow negotiators worked through the night, on Thanksgiving, to close the deal on what became UN General Assembly Resolution 61/105, the same landmark 2006 resolution covered in this show's Tuesday episode, which required impact assessments and area closures to protect vulnerable seabeds and deep-sea corals from bottom trawling. With one country threatening to hold up the whole agreement, she told them plainly: she wasn't going to ask them to agree, only to accept it. No one raised an objection, and the resolution passed by consensus around 9 a.m. on Thanksgiving morning.

Getting Everyone in the Tent

That's Koehler's real definition of success in this line of work. It's rarely a clean, decisive win. It's getting something strong enough to actually matter while keeping "everyone who needs to be inside the tent" actually inside the tent, meaning every country whose buy-in, ratification, and implementation the agreement depends on. Push too hard for a strong agreement and you lose the room. Compromise too much to keep everyone happy and you end up with something that doesn't accomplish anything. Finding that balance, she says, is what these negotiations really come down to.

Governance Is What Civilization Is Built On

Koehler also draws a straight line from her anthropology background to how she thinks about fisheries governance itself. Governance, she says, is essentially what civilization is based on: an agreed set of rules, and somewhere to go when something goes wrong. Without that structure, managing a species that crosses dozens of jurisdictions turns into a free-for-all. That's also the philosophy behind ISSF's own transparency and accountability work. The organization doesn't certify fisheries; that's a Marine Stewardship Council function. What ISSF does is build the evidence trail: participating seafood companies are audited annually with public compliance reports, and vessels are tracked on public registries scored against specific conservation measures. Retailers like Costco and Walmart use that data to decide what they'll put on a shelf, which is how a decision made in a windowless UN room eventually shapes what shows up in a grocery store.

What's Left to Fix, and Why She's Still Optimistic

Koehler is realistic about what's still unresolved, from uneven observer coverage between purse seine and longline fleets to getting the public value of well-managed fisheries better understood outside the industry. But she's also genuinely optimistic, pointing to real wins like the recent, hard-won bans on entangling FAD netting across every major tuna RFMO. Her closing message for anyone frustrated by how slowly international ocean policy moves: it's a process, and it takes time, because it means getting dozens of countries, with different cultures, languages, and capacities, to actually agree.

Takeaways:

• International fisheries governance runs through treaty-based RFMOs that nearly every country with a stake in a fishery has legally bound itself to join and follow.
• The negotiating skill Holly says matters most isn't legal expertise, it's listening for what a country means behind what it says, since "where you stand depends on where you sit."
• The all-night Thanksgiving session that produced UN Resolution 61/105, the landmark bottom-trawling and seamount protections covered in this show's Tuesday companion episode, was chaired by Holly herself.
• Holly measures negotiating success by getting an agreement strong enough to matter while keeping every country that needs to ratify or implement it "inside the tent."
• ISSF doesn't certify fisheries itself. It builds the audited evidence trail, through annual company audits and public vessel compliance data, that feeds into the Marine Stewardship Council certification a shopper actually sees on a label.