Taking a bottom-up perspective, this book explores local framings of a wide range of issues related to benefit-sharing, a growing concept in global environmental governance. Benefit-sharing in Environmental Governance draws on original case studies from South Africa, Namibia, Greece, Argentina, and Malaysia to shed light on what benefit-sharing looks like from the local viewpoint. These local-level case studies move away from the idea of benefit-sharing as defined by a single international organization or treaty. Rather, they reflect different situations where benefit-sharing has been considered, including agriculture, access to land and plants, wildlife management, and extractives industries. Common themes in the experiences of local communities form the basis for an exploration of spaces for local voices at the international level in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), often argued to be the most open arena to non-state actors, and therefore vital to how local voices may be included at the global level. The book analyzes the decisions of the CBD parties to produce an in-depth reflection on how this arena builds and delimits spaces for the expression of local community themes, and paths for local community participation including community protocols. The book then situates the bottom-up findings in the wider debate about global civil society and deliberative democracy in environmental governance. This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, environmental law, political ecology and global governance, as well as practitioners and policymakers involved in multilateral environmental agreements.

This book analyses the status and prospects of the global governance of Access Benefit Sharing (ABS) in the aftermath of 2010’s Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD’s initial 1992 framework of global ABS governance established the objective of sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources fairly between countries and communities. Since then, ABS has been a contested issue in international politics – not least due to the failure of effective implementation of the original CBD framework. The Nagoya Protocol therefore aims to improve and enhance this framework. Compared to the slow rate of progress on climate change, it has been considered a major achievement of global environmental governance, but it has also been coined a ‘masterpiece of ambiguity’. This book analyses the role of a variety of actors in the emergence of the Nagoya Protocol and provides an up-to-date assessment of the core features of the architecture of global ABS governance. This book offers a central resource regarding ABS governance for those working on and interested in global environmental governance. This is achieved by focusing on two broad themes of the wider research agenda on global environmental governance, namely architecture and agency. Furthermore, individual chapter contributions relate and link ABS governance to other prominent debates in the field, such as institutional complexes, compliance, market-based approaches, EU leadership, the role of small states, the role of non-state actors and more. Partly due to its seeming technical complexity, ABS governance has so far not been at the centre of attention of scholars and practitioners of global environmental governance. In this book, care is taken to provide an accessible account of key functional features of the governance system which enables non-specialists to gain a grasp on the main issues involved, allowing the issue of ABS governance to move centre-stage and be more fully recognised in discussions on global environmental governance.

Biomedical research is increasingly carried out in low- and middle-income countries. International consensus has largely been achieved around the importance of valid consent and protecting research participants from harm. But what are the responsibilities of researchers and funders to share the benefits of their research with research participants and their communities? After setting out the legal, ethical and conceptual frameworks for benefit sharing, this collection analyses seven historical cases to identify the ethical and policy challenges that arise in relation to benefit sharing. A series of recommendations address possible ways forward to achieve justice for research participants in low- and middle-income countries.

Key points In the absence of robust national or subnational policies for benefit sharing, land-use change initiatives in Indonesia have developed their own approaches to distributing benefits. At the local level, support and capacity building are needed to strengthen intermediary institutions in order to improve governance and increase legitimacy when deciding how to share benefits.Nonmonetary benefits such as land tenure, capacity building, infrastructure and access to natural resources have been especially important. However, in some cases there are nonmonetary burdens associated with intended benefits.The legitimacy of benefit-sharing arrangements is determined more by the actors involved than the type of land-use change associated with them. Conservation initiatives, REDD+ projects and oil palm initiatives all exhibited both high and low levels of legitimacy in their benefit-sharing arrangements.The legitimacy of benefit-sharing arrangements can be compromised by the lack of broad consultation with local actors including customary authorities, lack of community control over access to land snd limited livelihoods options for communities.

The book aims to address the lack of information on the experiences of others by providing a comparative analysis of national access and benefit-sharing laws and policies in the 41 Pacific Rim countries that signed the CBD. It provides key insights on the main characteristics of selected access and benefit-sharing (ABS) policies and laws, their development, and implementation process. It contains a detailed comparative analysis of existing laws and policies. It presents four case studies of countries with regulations in place and contrasts them with four case studies of countries that are struggling to develop their regulations. It ends by discussing options of an international regime on ABS and a summary analysis of the main lessons and recommendations from the study.

This book provides a first-of-its-kind review and analysis of benefit sharing frameworks between extractive industries and Indigenous and local communities in different parts of the Arctic. The authors describe a wealth of case studies in order to examine predominant practices, policies, arrangements, mechanisms and impact assessment methodologies. They also discuss possible ways to improve and advance existing benefit sharing regimes, in order to attain fair and equitable benefit sharing and support sustainable development. Among the topics covered in the book are corporate social responsibility and social license to operate, principles and methodologies of determining compensation, legal and informal frameworks of benefit sharing, community response to extractive activities, and global-to-local linkages that shape benefit sharing processes. The book will be of interest to academics, industry experts, legal specialists, policymakers, community members concerned with industrial activities, and anyone interested in sustainable development in the Arctic.