tl;dr The Owner (basic) role has only a subset of the GCS permissions present in the Storage Admin (predefined) role—notably, Owners cannot access bucket metadata, list/read objects, etc. You would need to grant the Storage Admin (or another, less privileged) role to provide the needed permissions.
NOTE: This explanation applies to GCS buckets using uniform bucket-level access.
In my case, I had enabled uniform bucket-level access on an existing bucket, and found I could no longer list objects, despite being an Owner of its GCP project.
This seemed to contradict how GCP IAM permissions are inherited— organization → folder → project → resource / GCS bucket—since I expected to have Owner access at the bucket level as well.
But as it turns out, the Owner permissions were being inherited as expected, rather, they were insufficient for listing GCS objects.
The Storage Admin role has the following permissions which are not present in the Owner role: [1]
storage.buckets.get
storage.buckets.getIamPolicy
storage.buckets.setIamPolicy
storage.buckets.update
storage.multipartUploads.abort
storage.multipartUploads.create
storage.multipartUploads.list
storage.multipartUploads.listParts
storage.objects.create
storage.objects.delete
storage.objects.get
storage.objects.getIamPolicy
storage.objects.list
storage.objects.setIamPolicy
storage.objects.update
This explained the seemingly strange behavior. And indeed, after granting the Storage Admin role (whereby my user was both Owner and Storage Admin), I was able to access the GCS bucket.
Footnotes
Though the documentation page Understanding roles omits the list of permissions for Owner (and other basic roles), it's possible to see this information in the GCP console:
- Go to "IAM & Admin"
- Go to "Roles"
- Filter for "Owner"
- Go to "Owner"
- (See list of permissions)