Effective governance of access and benefit-sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity

Abstract

Access and benefit-sharing (ABS) is a market-based approach aimed at preserving biodiversity. Its effectiveness has been questioned in international discussions for many years. It is evident that the approach's success has fallen far short of what was expected: degradation of biodiversity continues, and only few benefits arising from the commercial use of biodiversity have been shared with the providers of biodiversity. The reason for this failure is a lack of incentives. However, an analytical assessment of the effectiveness of the concept is lacking so far. The present paper raises the question how ABS must be designed in order to be effective while also helping to protect biodiversity and promote a fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from its commercialization. This paper identifies six critical factors that determine the effectiveness of ABS governance and discusses under what circumstances a critical factor increases or decreases in effectiveness. Furthermore, the paper analyses so-called countermeasures that impact on these circumstances. In specifying the critical factors and their interplay with the countermeasures, the paper gives guidance on how to develop more effective ABS regimes.

Access and Benefit Sharing under the Convention on Biological Diversity and Its Protocol: What Can Some Numbers Tell Us about the Effectiveness of the Regulatory Regime?

“…In other words, through the CBD, the international community wanted to establish a global regime regulating the access to GR which are used to perform scientific researches so as to enable the fair sharing of the benefits that may arise from those research activities. Although important efforts have been undertaken to make such a regime effective, culminating with the adoption of a binding protocol to the CBD-the Nagoya Protocol (NP)-in 2010, important and numerous reservations were expressed by scholars [3][4][5][6][7], researchers dealing with GR [4,[8][9][10], as well as by countries which provide GR [1,4,[11][12][13] on the regime's capacity to achieve its objectives. The purpose of this article is to empirically verify how those doubts about the effectiveness of the ABS regime are confirmed by the results the regime obtained so far, based on its core instrument: the ABS agreements concluded between users and providers of GR.…”

“…Key publications on the ABS regime implemented through the CBD and its protocol note its difficulties, so far, in achieving its objectives, as very few ABS agreements have been concluded and consequently very few benefits have been shared [2,3,[6][7][8][28][29][30].…”

Critical success factors for governing farmer-managed public goods in rural areas in the Netherlands

“…(4) Good governance. Richerzhagen (2011) follows the World Bank's Governance Indicators for describing good governance (e.g. accountability, political stability and regulatory quality).…”

“…In this paper, we will explore the critical success factors put forward by Richerzhagen (2011) for governing public goods in two Dutch case studies and especially which of the factors apply for governing farmer-managed public goods.…”

“…We especially look at factors enhancing the effectiveness of governing farmer-managed public goods. We use the work of Richerzhagen (2011) on 'access and benefit-sharing' (ABS) to structure the insights into success factors for the provision and maintenance of farmer-managed public goods. Herewith, we compare two different regions in the Netherlands in which integrated rural development started in the 1990s and where a significant change occurred in land use from a dominance of agricultural production towards an integration of primary production with other functions, such as nature and landscape conservation, on-farm sales and agro-tourism (Jongeneel, Polman, & Slangen, 2008).…”