ABSTRACT
Biodiversity’s general definition as some form of variety or diversity of life ‘fails to provide understanding when used in communications for research or management’. Global biodiversity’s ‘grand bargain’ fell into irrelevance, as globalization itself waned. Biodiversity ‘reserves’ have continued to dwindle, and their decline across the world remains a serious environmental problem. For biodiversity, treaty violations do not exist and have never existed, unless one counts submitting national biodiversity action plans late. This classical framing of an environmental problem in need of intervention from the international community was swiftly upended by its encounter with sustainable development, and then by the Global South’s own problematizations of biodiversity in the context of resource distribution. Genetic gold ‘fever’ completed the shift. Biodiversity is a technology of government, a tool that allows the framing of governmental thought, of an argument regarding what ‘needs to be done’ or rather what needs to be governed.
