ABSTRACT
The trajectories of globalization have resulted in multifaceted and contradictory outcomes for biodiversity protection. Moves to envision the world as an interconnected global ecological system were highly infl uential in the formative international environmental laws1 that emerged in the 1970s. These laws were directed towards conserving the unique and special. Early initiatives became the foundation for later, specifi c modes of biodiversity governance.2 Such models were premised on the sustainable utilization of biodiversity, and found expression in multilateral instruments, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).3 Drawing authority from western knowledge systems, and in particular ecological science, these biodiversity laws instituted an ever more sophisticated and complex institutional and bureaucratic structure.4 The public international law frameworks adopted corresponding principles of equity and common responsibility, which ostensibly sought to redress major global inequities. By contrast, globalization as a grounded economic, political and social ordering has exacerbated the loss of biodiversity and precipitated wide disparities in the distribution of benefi ts from the exploitation of biodiversity. Globalization has continued historical patterns of colonization and ‘development’, which have transformed many wilderness areas and high-biodiversity-value conservation areas into degraded ecosystems. Thus, despite ever more expansive global legal frameworks for biodiversity protection, biodiversity loss is escalating. Most recently, biodiversity protection has been recognized as integral to an emerging set of global imperatives that seek to achieve substantial poverty reduction for many ‘local’ peoples. Biodiversity has been co-opted to a process of globalized localism, where the dominant mode of scientifi c knowledge and practice
converts all to its universal form as the basis of integrating diverse locations, scales and cultural perspectives. To respond to such transnational imperatives, local conditions must be ‘disintegrated, destructed, and, eventually, restructured, as a subordinate inclusion’.5 Increasingly, therefore, a nexus is predicated between biodiversity protection at a local level and the achievement of social and economic goals at a global level.6 These goals are putatively global in orientation, but western in emphasis in the coalescence of science, technology and economic measures designed to achieve these conjoint objectives. With the impetus of these globalized concerns, ‘[m]any international conservation institutions have aligned themselves with efforts to address poverty’.7 Indeed, the 2010 Biodiversity target, sanctioned by parties to the CBD,8 sets out ‘to achieve by 2010 a signifi cant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefi t of all life on earth.’9
