1st Edition
Biocultural Rights, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Protecting Culture and the Environment
This volume presents a comprehensive overview of biocultural rights, examining how we can promote the role of indigenous peoples and local communities as environmental stewards and how we can ensure that their ways of life are protected.
With Biocultural Community Protocols (BCPs) or Community Protocols (CPs) being increasingly seen as a powerful way of tackling this immense challenge, this book investigates these new instruments and considers the lessons that can be learnt about the situation of indigenous peoples and local communities. It opens with theoretical insights which provide the reader with foundational concepts such as biocultural diversity, biocultural rights and community rule-making. In Part Two, the book moves on to community protocols within the Access Benefit Sharing (ABS) context, while taking a glimpse into the nature and role of community protocols beyond issues of access to genetic resources and traditional knowledge. A thorough review of specific cases drawn from field-based research around the world is presented in this part. Comprehensive chapters also explore the negotiation process and raise stimulating questions about the role of international brokers and organizations and the way they can use BCPs/CPs as disciplinary tools for national and regional planning or to serve powerful institutional interests. Finally, the third part of the book considers whether BCPs/CPs, notably through their emphasis on "stewardship of nature" and "tradition", can be seen as problematic arrangements that constrain indigenous peoples within the Western imagination, without any hope of them reconstructing their identities according to their own visions, or whether they can be seen as political tools and representational strategies used by indigenous peoples in their struggle for greater rights to their land, territories and resources, and for more political space.
This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental law, indigenous peoples, biodiversity conservation and environmental anthropology. It will also be of great use to professionals and policymakers involved in environmental management and the protection of indigenous rights.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
1. Community Protocols and Biocultural Rights: Unravelling the Biocultural Nexus in ABS
Fabien Girard, Ingrid Hall and Christine Frison
Part 1. Conceptual Insights: Biocultural Diversity, Biocultural Rights and Space Making
2. A Biocultural Ethics Approach to Biocultural Rights: Exploring Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships through Ethics initiatives in Canada
Kelly Bannister
3. Sumaq kawsay (Good living) and Indigenous Potatoes: On the Delicate Exercise of Ontological Diplomacy
Ingrid Hall
4. Unmaking the Nature/Culture Divide: The Ontological Diplomacy of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities at the CBD
Ingrid Hall
5. From Obstruction to Decolonization? Contested Sovereignty, the Seed Treaty, and Biocultural Rights in the U.S./Turtle Island and Beyond
Garrett Graddy-Lovelace
6. The Legal Framework Behind Biocultural Rights: An Analysis of their Pros and Cons for Indigenous Peoples and for Local Communities
Giulia Sajeva
Part 2. Biocultural Community Protocols, Access and Benefit-Sharing, and Beyond
7. Community Protocols as Tools for Collective Action beyond Legal Pluralism – the Case of Tracks in the Salt
Pía Marchegiani and Louisa Parks
8. Biocultural Rights and Protocols in the Pacific
Miri (Margaret) Raven and Daniel Robinson
9. The Khoikhoi Community’s Biocultural Rights Journey with Rooibos
Leslé Jansen and Rayna Sutherland
10. Biocultural Community Protocols and Boundary Work in Madagascar: Enrolling Actors in the Messy World(s) of Global Biodiversity Conservation
Fabien Girard and Manohisoa Rakotondrabe
Part 3. Biocultural Jurisprudence, Sovereignty and Legal Subjectivity
11. Biocultural Community Protocols and the Ethic of Stewardship: The Sovereign Stewards of Biodiversity
Reia Anquet and Fabien Girard
12. Concluding Thoughts: Biocultural Jurisprudence in Hindsight: Lessons for the Way Forward
Fabien Girard, Christine Frison and Ingrid Hall
Biography
Fabien Girard is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA), France, and also a former Research Fellow, Maison Française d’Oxford (MFO), UK. He is the co-editor of The Commons, Plant Breeding and Agricultural Research (2018).
Ingrid Hall is an Associate Professor of anthropology at the University of Montréal, Canada, and an associate member of the Unité mixte de recherché Savoirs, Environnements, Sociétés (UMR SENS), France. She is the co-editor of Savoirs Locaux en Situation (2019).
Christine Frison is an FNRS Post-Doctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research in Legal Sciences of the UCLouvain, Belgium. Her latest books are The Commons, Plant Breeding and Agricultural Research (2018) and Redesigning the Global Seed Commons (2018).
"This is a timely, comprehensive contribution to the literature and practice at the nexus of international environmental law and human rights, that boldly addresses critical questions on the sovereignty and stewardship of biodiversity across a broad range of regional perspectives."
Elisa Morgera, Professor of Global Environmental Law, University of Strathclyde Law School, Glasgow, United Kingdom"Environmental jurisprudence over the last two decades has been radically transformed. This epistemic shift is symbolized by the waning of the ideas of ownership and the ascent ideas of stewardship when it comes to lands and waters. The shift has been the result of a growing realization that the dominant discourse of private property has played a key role in the collapse of ecosystems and changing climate. Confronted with the existential question of survival of our species, communities, activists and academics have begun to ask ontological questions regarding the nature of the juridical subject. Specifically, what does it mean to be human and what is our relationship to the natural world. The book you have in your hands is a glorious map of stories, histories and analyses of what is arguably the most critical conversation of the Anthropocene. It consists of riveting essays by some of the best contemporary cartographers of political ecology. It is metacognition at its finest and I urge you to read it and let it transform you."
Sanjay Kabir Bavikatte, Co-founder of Natural Justice, Lawyers for Communities and the Environment and author of Stewarding the Earth: Rethinking Property and the Emergence of Biocultural Rights"In the late 1980s, Darrell Posey and others made the world aware of the inextricable link between biological and cultural diversity. This suggested the possibility of new legal and ethical frameworks, and broad-based actions especially at local level. This exceptional volume builds on Dr Posey’s visionary work, showcasing the latest thinking on 'bioculturalism', an issue whose positive resolution all of us has a major stake in."
Dr Graham Dutfield, Professor of International Governance, University of Leeds, United Kingdom
