Conflicting claims on biological resources are an important challenge in the international biodiversity regime. This paper disentangles what claims on biological resources are being made at different levels by different actors and draws on philosophical conceptions of global justice to analyse whether and where just solutions to these conflicting claims have been realised.
The accelerating loss of biodiversity constitutes a major challenge to the livelihood of people all around the world since they all depend on ecosystem services for food, medicines, protection against natural disasters and so on. Therefore the conservation of biodiversity is being promoted at the international level through agreements such as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). However, the establishment of protected areas as one major mechanism to implement the CBD frequently forecloses the access of local people in developing countries to important resources to meet their daily needs. Conflicts between global conservation needs and local resource use needs are thus inevitable. This paper draws on global (environmental) justice theories to discuss what might be just solutions to these competing claims. Subsequently, the paper analyses what practical solutions have been found to these competing claims in the implementation of the CBD. The Global Environment Facility (GEF) is the financial mechanism of the CBD and distributes international donor money for the conservation of globally relevant biodiversity in developing countries. The proposed paper will look at different GEF implementation projects for the CBD and outline how they allocate access to resources and what compensation they provide for access restrictions. Finally, the paper will analyse to what extent these empirical outcomes meet the demands from global (environmental) justice theory identified earlier. Overall, the paper should thereby also serve as a contribution to closing the gap between normative and empirical analysis of international politics.
