ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of the 1990s there have been numerous attempts to politicise and regulate crucial societal problems on an international scale. Environmental problems belong to the most important subject-matters of these efforts. This is visible not least in the fact that the series of UN conferences which took place in the 1990s was opened by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An important result of UNCED was the Framework Convention on Climate Change, dealing with a subject of indisputable significance and urgency. A second and equally important result of UNCED was the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which addresses the loss of biological diversity and its economic, social and political implications. The CBD came into force in 1993, but 15 years later the impact of this international agreement as well as of related political terrains still remains contested. After many years of further negotiations and programme formulation at the international level, designed to concretise and realise the commitments entailed in the convention, it is recognised that the implementation at the national and regional/ local levels remains crucial and that many problems of an effective ‘‘new biodiversity order’’ (Le Prestre 2002) are linked to weak implementation. The relationship between the international and other policy levels is subject to further considerations. Therefore, this question has been placed at the top of the agenda at the ninth Conference of the Parties (i.e. member states) in Bonn, Germany, in May 2008. A second dimension is the highly contested relationship of the CBD and
other international agreements. The CBD itself is part of a contested governance system which embraces other environmental agreements dealing with species or ecosystem conservation – such as the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). In particular, the relationship between the CBD and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its treaty on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is one of the most controversial issues in international politics. This is not the case merely by chance. The CBD itself is not purely an environmental agreement designed for the conservation of endangered species. It addresses issues that range from the protection of ecosystems over the rights of local people, the economic
value of genetic resources and the handling of technologies related to their commercialisation all the way up to intellectual property rights and the fair sharing of benefits arising from the use of biodiversity. Thus, environmental concerns are strongly connected to the regulation of economic and technological processes, questions of justice as well as international and domestic power relations. Because of this broad scope and the integration of environmental and development concerns, the CBD is ‘‘perhaps the first true sustainable development convention’’ (Le Prestre 2002: 1). For the same reason, the fate of the CBD, its strengths and weaknesses and its impact on the new international order in general provides an ideal field of investigation to estimate the impact of the concept of sustainable development since the Rio Conference (Conca et al. 2007). This book deals with one central aspect of this broad research field, that is
with the conflicts concerning the appropriation of genetic resources. Genetic resources are one element of biological diversity, or biodiversity. This concept is actually a new one which encompasses not only the variety of species but also the diversity of ecosystems as well as the hereditary characteristics of plants and animals (cf. Chapter 2). The latter, that is the genetic properties, gain importance as a crucial resource in the context of emerging genetic technology for industrial production. Some observers call genetic resources the ‘‘oil of the information age’’ which indicates their enormous real and potential value. With that, a specific political dynamic has emerged around the conditions and forms of use of genetic resources. The appropriation of biological and genetic resources is not at all a new
phenomenon. Rather, for centuries it was an integral part of the colonial world order, and more recently it continues to be a key strategy in the neocolonial world order. However, during the phases of colonialism, classical imperialism and post-war neocolonialism there were rarely open conflicts around these issues, even if biological resources were central for colonial or imperial politics. This was largely the case up until the early 1980s when the issue became a subject of international concern. Three different developments are important here: the material erosion of genetic diversity – in particular seeds valuable for food and agriculture – which has become obvious ever since the late 1960s. Second, the distributional effects between Northern and Southern countries – connected with the use of genetic resources, especially in the agricultural sector – became a political issue in the early 1980s and initiated a process which was called by some observers ‘‘seed wars’’. This led to political struggles about the creation of a political, legal and institutional framework in order to regulate the emerging conflicts as well as rising environmental concerns regarding the erosion of biodiversity and distributional conflicts about their economic use. Third, technological developments, that is genetic engineering, brought a new dynamic to the conflict field. Therefore, in the 1980s, a global regulation system was created with the CBD as its central element. When analysing these regulation systems, it is important to understand that questions of how to deal
with global environmental problems are inextricably linked to political and economic issues which arise from the regulation of the exchange of genetic resources as well as stemming from social conflicts regarding food supply and the potential development of ‘‘marginalised’’ areas. Against the background of this historical dynamic we want to outline and
analyse central elements of the international political economy of genetic resources, that is its contested institutional and discursive terrains, in the context of the societal transformation towards post-Fordism and the internationalisation of the state. For this, we take into account the global regulation system as an outcome, medium and presupposition of social struggles, power relations, ecological concerns and challenges for biodiversity governance. At the centre of our inquiry are the mechanisms of the regulation of
access to genetic resources and the sharing of benefits arising out of their use. Access and benefit-sharing (ABS), however, are not merely technical or juridical issues. Because of the specific nature of this conflict field and the strong relationships between environmental and distributional dimensions, the question of ABS constitutes the key issue of this global regulation system. Here, environmental issues such as the erosion of genetic diversity are strongly connected to the regulation of the global economy and of the most modern technologies. Moreover, ABS affects social dimensions such as the rights of marginalised local or indigenous people. Last, but not least, it encompasses a complex field of processes where the ‘‘enclosure’’ of formerly free available commons (Kloppenburg/Balick 1996: 177) is at stake. This imposition is mostly vindicated via economic reasoning but is
linked to the far-reaching transformation of societal practices and living conditions around the world. Decisive here is the imposition of intellectual property rights on genetic information which constitutes very specific and exclusive private property rights over crops and medicinal plants. Intellectual property gains importance through the extension of patents on genetic resources – including those practices which are criticised as biopiracy. Another important issue is the question of how those nation-states rich in biodiversity can ‘‘get their share’’ of the economic use of ‘‘their’’ resources but also of concern is how local people are involved in this benefit sharing. In this context, to some degree new forms of property titles are discussed and different models of benefit-sharing are tested. In these highly contested processes a huge variety of different actors with
diverging and sometimes opposing interests and very different power resources are involved. Indeed, the variety of actors involved includes: international and national corporations, governments, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, research institutes, epistemic communities as well as local actors such as indigenous communities and local farmers. Our investigation focuses, on the one hand, on the conflicts between these different actors and how they are inscribed institutionally and discursively at different levels and, on the other hand, on how the institutional selectivities of this complex multi-level system shape these conflicts,
that is the political economy of contested terrains. Over time we became aware of the relevance of these multiple institutional levels and the complex relationships between them. A global management of genetic resources is emerging which connects supranational, international, regional (in our case NAFTA), national and local levels of policy formulation and implementation. What is at stake is, however, how these levels are produced and linked to each other: how international and supranational processes influence and are influenced by local and national structures, configurations of interest and power relations. Therefore, it is not only about the implementation of international politics as a top-down process but also how international conflict terrains and global strategies are influenced from the bottom up, that is by local problems and the interests of locally embedded actors. What is important, in other words, is the upscaling and downscaling of politics connected with the transformation of the nation-state. The global management of genetic resources is a good example, too, because the importance of the local is at least formally acknowledged. However, we need to enquire as to whether or not this formal acknowledgement is sufficient and which possibilities of shaping societal relations really exist for local actors. These questions are dealt with in a case study about Mexico. Thus, this book focuses on the forms in which these complex conflicts are
dealt with at the international, national, regional and local levels. It examines how the complex regulation system has emerged, how the conflicts are institutionalised at the various levels as well as what opportunities exist for the democratic shaping of these processes, particularly regarding the relationships between these levels. This global regulating system is analysed as an example of the transfor-
mation of political forms of steering, participation and control, and for the shaping of global societal relations. The transformation of the state and the state system, connected with the new round of capitalist globalisation, that is the neoliberal and imperial restructuring of politics and economics, can be analysed productively and with many insights for other policy fields. We propose an enhanced perspective on these transformations, calling this
the internationalisation of the state. By this we mean that the nation-state does not disappear. On the contrary, our aim is to show that the formal sovereignty of states over genetic resources plays a crucial role in the creation of global markets. Nevertheless, this does not mean that nation-states – in particular those in the global South where most of these resources are located – have real control over their use and the distribution of benefits. On the contrary, it is our contention that global markets and international institutions such as the WTO impose pressure on and hence, undermine the national steering capabilities of these nation-states. Economic processes, however, are analysed in this book in the tradition of a critical (International) Political Economy which sees them as always embedded in political and socio-cultural processes. Thus, the accelerating internationalisation of the economy requires multi-level political-institutional processes and structures.
And this transformation towards the internationalisation of the state is not only about the changing capacities of control but also concerns the comprehensive transformation of relations of political and societal domination. They are linked with new forms of economic production and reproduction as well as the far-reaching transformations of societies and cultures. Our main assumption is that these developments need to be taken into account in order to adequately evaluate the possibilities of political shaping. This is the reason why the present inquiry not only analyses the possibilities and limits of political control of social and economic processes but also addresses the connected power relations and societal processes of domination. Thus, we analyse the conflicts about genetic resources against the background of broader societal changes; what we call – from the perspective of regulation theory – the transformation from Fordism to post-Fordism. We see the resource conflicts as an expression of new global conflict lines connected with a new phase in capitalist development. In this transformation process new technologies (such as information and communication technologies or new forms of biotechnology) are as important as new societal relationships with nature. This concept, developed in the tradition of the critical theory of the so-called Frankfurt School, highlights the way societies are interconnected with the biophysical conditions of their existence, while at the same time constructing nature practically (i.e. technically, economically) and discursively (e.g. culturally or scientifically). Finally, we want to analyse the opportunities that exist to realise a democratic shaping of societal relations under changing conditions.1
