ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 summarizes the main findings of the book: about the ways that local communities frame issues around benefit-sharing; about the spaces available for these issues in the Convention on Biological Diversity; and about international participation by local communities. It then opens up the significance of the questions linked to benefit-sharing and local community participation to other areas of scholarship. First, literature on global civil society helps to place local communities’ everyday politics in a broad field that includes a range of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements. The critical literature on ‘NGOization’ and its arguments about the dominance of international NGOs based in the global North underline why local communities need to be involved for environmentally just global governance. The central questions raised from this bottom-up study of benefit-sharing are finally linked to the literature on deliberative democracy, both theoretical and practical. Local communities, supported by NGOs in long-term relationships aiming at empowerment, can strengthen deliberative democratic inputs for global environmental justice more broadly, and locally sensitive global policies in particular.
