Property Rights, Equity, and Transnational Trade in Nature and Knowledge International Association for the Study of Common Property Oaxaca, Mexico; August 2004 Abstract:      Efforts to manage the earth’s natural environments “globally” have generated new forms of property and entitlements designed to enlist resource users in the global South in conservation activities. Projects to reward farming, forest, and coastal communities for ecological stewardship and for allowing access to genetic and other resources by outsiders have been developed within the framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The CBD instructs governments to ensure that the “benefits of biodiversity” are shared with resource providers, including “local and indigenous” communities. Access and benefit-sharing (ABS) guidelines were adopted by the CBD in 2002 and were recognized by the 2003World Summit on Sustainable Development.      Many of the new compensation and benefit-sharing projects assume or construct a property-rights and market-exchange framework for conceptualizing, valuing, and managing resources and ecosystem services. They resonate with proposals for a worldwide intellectual-property regime for traditional knowledge under the aegis of the World Intellectual Property Organization, the globalization of so-called Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights through the WTO, and multilateral efforts to establish markets in environmental services and genetic resources.      Challenges to successful and equitable implementation of ABS within this framework are both biophysical and political-economic. The distribution of genetic resources and ecosystem services is seldom congruent with the legal or physical boundaries of the communities that might exchange them for monetary or other benefits. Tremendous asymmetries in economic and legal capacity and bargaining power between cash-poor but biodiversity-rich communities and potential resource buyers mean that the poor typically trade their resources cheaply. Benefit-sharing and recognition of local resource rights remains voluntary. Some indigenous alliances and NGO networks object strongly to the linkage of local rights and benefit sharing to intellectual property and to the treatment of nature and culture as tradable commodities.      A more general problem with this ABS framework is that it based the values of ecosystems and their components on the international market prices that firms or consumers will to pay for medicinal-plant samples, carbon-sequestration functions of forests, or clean water. This conceptual reductionism occludes and devalues the multiple, place-specific use values, exchange values, and cultural values of living ecosystems and landscapes to the people who are part of them. It subordinates local livelihood needs and development objectives to “market signals”, especially those from abroad.      Can these problems be overcome by means of more flexible and pluralist approaches to local resource rights and property claims, such as models that emphasize collective property and/or overlapping tenure rights to multiple resources? Would a globally mandated requirement for the international legal recognition of property rights in traditional knowledge, now called for by some governments, help address these problem? In considering these questions, it is useful to compare the assumptions and discursive practices of multilateral and state initiatives to promote intellectual and cultural property rights with those of civil-society organizations that call for local rights to resources, farmer’s crop varieties, and cultural knowledge but oppose patenting and privatization of nature and knowledge and the linkage of benefit-sharing to property rights.  back to top