Getting the Strongest Players doesn't Make a Winning Team: Business and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety

Résumé 0

The study of the influence of business actors in global environmental governance has been mainly dominated by Neo-Gramscian scholars using a structuralist approach to account for private sector’s influence in the environmental realm. On the contrary, this paper aims at giving a pluralist contribution to the same field while developing the example of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, an international regime regulating the transboundary movements of genetically modified organisms (GMO). The theoretical framework is based on a multi-level -local, national, and international- analysis underlying three elements that have been neglected by former studies. These three elements are (i) the unity of the private sector, (ii) the network capacities of industrial actors, and (iii) the specificity of environmental negotiations. In order to do so, the paper progressively looks at the different business groupings involved in the negotiations; analyses the lobby strategies of the private sector, particularly their links with national governments; and questions to which extent these actions fit into global environmental policy-making. It demonstrates the late involvement of business actors in the negotiations of the Cartagena Protocol characterised by the creation in 1998 of an international business coalition, the global industry coalition (GIC). The GIC easily networked with the GMO exporting countries –the Miami group- opposed to the protocol. However, to convince the strongest players doesn’t make a winning team: the isolation of the Miami group during the negotiations seriously undermined the abilities of the private sector to influence the final text of the protocol. From a methodological point of view the study relies on some fieldwork conducted at the last CBD-biosafety meetings as well as archived material on the negotiations.