BIOCULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS AND THE ETHIC OF STEWARDSHIP: STEWARDSHIP: The Sovereign Stewards of Biodiversity

Abstract

Biocultural Community Protocols (BCPs) would appear to solve the Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) conundrum for indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). Resituated in a dynamic context characterised by community-based initiatives built on the “biocultural axiom”, BCPs ensure a community’s right to development. They supposedly support an IPLC’s role in biodiversity conservation and maintenance and ascertain that their unique livelihoods and ways of life are not affected by the unfettered extension of market economies and the language of trade. Grounding its analysis in political economy, the chapter questions this optimistic vision, arguing that maintaining IPLCs’ identities within the ABS framework would imply a complete overhaul in Western/European legal constructs and their naturalistic underpinnings. With this aim in mind, we scrutinise how seven BCPs under consideration strive to reconcile different worlds and seem to stumble again and again on the naturalistic “ontological matrix” at the core of Western/European legal constructs. However, the way this matrix unfolds in several of the BCPs studied – the interlacing of narratives and representations around biodiversity conservation, their apparent strategic reversals, together with references to the ethic of stewardship – are invitations to consider further what BCPs offer in terms of strategic use of hegemonic categories. Using the heuristic category of script – as stories and non-discursive elements (e.g. objects, conducts, and institutions) which can “define actors” (Akrich), allocate roles and tasks, and “enscript” – the chapter shows that BCPs may be deployed in domestic politics or international fora as a means to control IPLCs and replace political negotiation with managerial efficiency. At the same time, our work unveils the strategic use of scripts, particularly a dominant “steward of biodiversity” script, which has much to do with the “noble ecological savage” myth. This script also distinctively hinges upon a new ethic – the ethic of stewardship – capable of sustaining new representations and counter-discourses. It thereby creates cracks in the European-centred matrix. IPLCs, through a strategic partnership with academics and civil society organisations in developing BCPs, are capable of unravelling the ontological threads of modernity and negotiating spaces for the advent of a new form of legal subjectivity.