When the first Conference of the Parties to the BBNJ Agreement decides where the secretariat should sit, the joint offer from Belgium and Chile will be among the most closely watched. Its outline is familiar: the secretariat's principal functions would be anchored in Valparaíso, while the physical and technical backbone of the Clearing-House Mechanism would be housed in Brussels, which might also host meetings of subsidiary bodies. The proposal is presented as a practical North-South partnership that could help the Conference reach a decision. But the way the offer is put together, its departure from established practice and the operational burden it would create deserve closer scrutiny than the politics of the contest alone allows.
The Agreement gives the Conference of the Parties the authority to decide both the seat of the secretariat and the detailed arrangements for the Clearing-House Mechanism, which the secretariat is to manage. The main institutional choices should be made collectively after entry into force. The Belgium-Chile package, however, folds two separate questions—where the secretariat sits and where the Mechanism's infrastructure is hosted—into one pre-arranged offer. Parties are asked to accept or reject a division of functions that has not been examined on its own merits. The Conference would retain the formal right to adjust the package later, but in practice the burden of pulling the elements apart would fall on those who prefer to consider them separately. This narrows deliberation at the very point when the Agreement envisages collective decision-making.
Practice under other multilateral environmental agreements does not point toward such a split. The Clearing-House Mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity works under the secretariat in Montreal; the joint information system of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions is run from Geneva. Regional and capacity-building centers may be scattered, but they serve as supplementary nodes, not as the home of the principal mechanism. The preference for keeping the secretariat and its information system together is not simply habit. It reflects the need for clear lines of accountability, close links between information management and policy work, and less friction in daily operations. There is no clear example of a formal hosting arrangement that places the main secretariat on one continent and the core physical infrastructure of its primary information-exchange mechanism on another. The Belgium-Chile proposal is therefore a departure. A new design is not ruled out in principle, but it needs a clear operational case, not merely the political convenience of combining two candidacies. So far that case has not been made.
The distance between Valparaíso and Brussels would also carry steady practical costs. The two cities are roughly twelve thousand kilometers apart, with a time difference of four to six hours. Overlapping working hours are limited, and travel takes the better part of a day. Digital tools can reduce the need for constant physical presence, but they cannot remove the consequences of formally designating a second city as the home of the Mechanism's technical infrastructure. Separate arrangements would be needed for legal status, privileges and immunities, procurement and liability. Responsibility for system performance, data security and service continuity would have to be divided and kept under review between the main secretariat and the infrastructure host. Over time, these layers would absorb resources and managerial attention that should go to implementing the Agreement. Other treaty secretariats have found that co-location avoids exactly this kind of friction. The proposed split would bring it back without a demonstrated need.
Politically, the joint candidacy is easy to understand. Chile has long presented Valparaíso as a Global South option; while Belgium has stressed Brussels's diplomatic and institutional capacity. The package keeps a Southern designation for the principal seat while giving Europe a role in the information mechanism and possibly in hosting subsidiary meetings. The result looks balanced, but it separates the city named as the main seat from a substantial part of the secretariat's operational substance. That may suit the short-term arithmetic of the race, but it risks fixing a gap between form and substance in the institution's design.
An integrated, single-site candidacy avoids the need to manage that gap across different host countries. China's early participation in the Agreement, its position as the largest financial contributor, and its concrete long-term commitments on premises give practical weight to such an option. An Asia-Pacific seat would also help correct the current geographic concentration of ocean governance institutions without adding the coordination costs of a trans-oceanic split. These points do not by themselves settle the question, but they show how a unified location can avoid several of the difficulties the joint proposal creates.
The Belgium-Chile arrangement is an understandable response to a competitive field. Yet it narrows the space for collective deliberation, departs from established institutional practice without a clear operational rationale, creates identifiable and recurring costs, and lets coalition-building shape the secretariat's functional design. The Conference of the Parties will make the final decision. That decision will be sounder if it rests on the arrangement most likely to preserve institutional coherence over the life of the Agreement.
The author is the director of the Center for International and Regional Studies, National Institute for South China Sea Studies.
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