Biocultural Community protocols, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities: the Making of Biodiversity Stewards

Résumé En

In recent years, much effort has been made to document and appraise the role of indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) in shaping the ecologies and resources of vast regions of the world. These changes have decisively contributed towards recognising IPLCs as major actors in the conservation of biodiversity. This immediately begs the question of how to maintain IPLCs’ ways of life and how to protect their “stewardship” role. For about a decade now, Biocultural Community Protocols (BCPs) or Community Protocols (CPs) have been seen as a powerful way of tackling this immense challenge. BCPs emphasise a community’s customary laws, its cultural heritage, world views and way of life, while at the same time making visible and explicit the local norms to be followed for securing free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and establishing mutually agreed terms (MAT) under access and benefit sharing obligations deriving from the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol. Hence, BCPs/CPs have been heralded as tools enabling substantive equality (e.g., through equitable benefit-sharing) and procedural fairness (e.g., through norms allowing culturally sensitive negotiations) in respect of access to resources and associated traditional knowledge (TK) within and outside communities. BCPs/CPs are also considered to be useful instruments for harnessing the potential of IPLCs in biodiversity conservation. While appeal to a “stewardship ethics” and reference to “biocultural diversity” are clear moves aimed at reclaiming sovereignty on natural resources, self-government and protection of cultural identity for IPLCs, BCPs also raise a number of issues (e.g., reification of communities, instrumentalization of tradition) that echo previous discussions on community- based natural resources management and people-centered conservation approaches. This paper offers a presentation of the scope of the book in preparation, placing it within the broader research project where it belongs (The project is named BIOCULTURALIS “Biocultural Community Protocols: Biocultural Heritage, Justice and Legal Pluralism”. Its project initiator is Fabien Girard and it is funded by the French Research Agency ANR (grant n° ANR-18-CE03-0003-01).