ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a number of problematizations, related to biodiversity, and focuses on the role of international law in this governmental project. It presents an eventual programme that sought to underline a particular treaty form as a solution to a – now global – problem of biodiversity loss. This form was that of a grand exchange, a ‘grand bargain’ between the North and the South. An almost parallel timeline occurred during the decade of the 1980s, where similar concerns as those explored and expressed through conservation biology’s and others’ problematization of biodiversity and its generalized decline were being addressed at the international level. A number of international precursors to the Convention on Biological Diversity created the path towards this international treaty. When biodiversity became internationalized, it came face to face with a whole different field of the political economy of development.
