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Taking a bottom-up perspective, this book explores local framings of a wide range of issues related to benefit-sharing, a growing concept in global environmental governance. Benefit-sharing in Environmental Governance draws on original case studies from South Africa, Namibia, Greece, Argentina, and Malaysia to shed light on what benefit-sharing looks like from the local viewpoint. These local-level case studies move away from the idea of benefit-sharing as defined by a single international organization or treaty. Rather, they reflect different situations where benefit-sharing has been considered, including agriculture, access to land and plants, wildlife management, and extractives industries. Common themes in the experiences of local communities form the basis for an exploration of spaces for local voices at the international level in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), often argued to be the most open arena to non-state actors, and therefore vital to how local voices may be included at the global level. The book analyzes the decisions of the CBD parties to produce an in-depth reflection on how this arena builds and delimits spaces for the expression of local community themes, and paths for local community participation including community protocols. The book then situates the bottom-up findings in the wider debate about global civil society and deliberative democracy in environmental governance. This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, environmental law, political ecology and global governance, as well as practitioners and policymakers involved in multilateral environmental agreements.

This book assesses how much influence social movements have on EU policy and the means through which influence is secured. Using wide-ranging case studies of campaigns from GMOs to water rights and Internet freedom, it elucidates the important differences between technical and political campaigns

The article uses the knowledge practice repertoire approach, combined with an integrated opportunity approach, to investigate the role that local community knowledge based on holistic worldviews plays in the formation of collective actors, action and outcomes. This is argued to be crucial given that environmental governance is shaped instead by knowledge based on a worldview of a nature/culture divide, and that local community knowledge is key to responding to the planetary crisis and subject to this potential ontological clash. Attention to local community collective action using this lens can shed light on whether and how spaces can be made for different approaches, giving a fresh view to how outcomes matter. The article presents two case studies of local community collective action through community protocols from South Africa and Argentina. Community protocols are documents, recognised in international environmental law, where local communities set out their worldviews, their traditional knowledge and practices in support of environmental protection, and link these to rights and protections in national and international law as a basis for collective action. They are thus ideal sites for investigating knowledge practices and ontological politics. Focusing on different types of knowledge practices and opportunity contexts helped to untangle the complex question of how outcomes mattered to the local communities in these cases.

Taking a bottom-up perspective, this book explores local framings of a wide range of issues related to benefit-sharing, a growing concept in global environmental governance.Benefit-sharing in Environmental Governance draws on original case studies from South Africa, Namibia, Greece, Argentina, and Malaysia to shed light on what benefit-sharing looks like from the local viewpoint. These local-level case studies move away from the idea of benefit-sharing as defined by a single international organization or treaty. Rather, they reflect different situations where benefit-sharing has been considered, including agriculture, access to land and plants, wildlife management, and extractives industries. Common themes in the experiences of local communities form the basis for an exploration of spaces for local voices at the international level in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), often argued to be the most open arena to non-state actors, and therefore vital to how local voices may be included at the global level. The book analyzes the decisions of the CBD parties to produce an in-depth reflection on how this arena builds and delimits spaces for the expression of local community themes, and paths for local community participation including community protocols. The book then situates the bottom-up findings in the wider debate about global civil society and deliberative democracy in environmental governance.This interdisciplinary book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental politics, environmental law, political ecology and global governance, as well as practitioners and policymakers involved in multilateral environmental agreements.

This paper discusses the existence and shape of a discursive space for local voices in the arena of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Political ecology and other critical literature on global environmental governance argues that dominant or hegemonic discourses shape decision-making in such arenas, and delimit the boundaries of possible policy choices. Discourses that shape global environmental governance are seen as rooted in a dominant worldview stemming notably from a capitalist view of value. This, it is argued, precludes discursive spaces for other types of worldviews based on different conceptions of value (for example commons approaches) held in those local communities considered crucial in protecting the environment and natural resources. The paper aims to contribute to this area of study by looking in detail at the CBD, argued by some as a more open arena for local voices. The contribution relies on a discourse analysis applied to the CBD's decisions since its creation and up to its most recent meetings held in late 2016. Essentially, the aim of the analysis is to apply the arguments of political ecology and other critical literature to the decisions of the CBD in order to investigate how far they conform to this critical view. The results presented here are the first to emerge from the initial discourse analysis, and further work is being carried out. Nevertheless, they suggest points of interest for further debate and research. ; BENELEX Working Paper No 15.-- Last revised 4 Jun 2018

Community protocols are documents, or otherwise recorded artefacts, that record the existing practices, rights and future visions of local groups as regards their natural resources. As such, they have been recognised within the framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity in its Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing as one tool that allows local groups to define issues around benefit-sharing. Literature on community protocols is emerging, and work in a number of areas (including global environmental politics, political ecology and socio-legal studies) touches on issues relevant to them. Reflections on the connections amongst these areas are missing however. This article seeks to bring their insights into conversation by reflecting on community protocols both as transpositions of global processes into local realities, and as holding the potential to shape global processes. The article considers how community protocols may address unequal power relations at the local, national and international levels, and their limitations in this respect. A number of core discourses are identified in the existing literature to characterise global and local environmental policies. These discourses guide a consideration of how community protocols may address power relations, and the potential pitfalls they may encounter. Overall, the article finds that there is a delimited space where community protocols may contribute to create spaces for dialogue between actors with diverging understandings of the world. Yet many threats exist to the creation of such spaces, stemming both from how communities are defined and from where the impetus for community protocols comes from: if these processes become externally imposed rather than community-driven their potential to tackle power relations will be compromised. ; BENELEX Working Paper No 11.-- Last revised 2 Oct 2017

Sidney Tarrow's book, the subject of this symposium, takes inspiration from the work of Charles Tilly. Tilly, as Tarrow points out in the introduction to the book, saw states and war as mutually constitutive, each changing the other and causing develop- ments through negotiations between citizens and authorities. Tarrow extends the point: "When states make war, this changes internal contention and thus the nature of the future state" (p. 7). To delve into how contention and the state constitute one another around wars, the book discusses three processes: mobilization for war, war- making and the conflicts that arise after wars end: the role of political contention at these different points forms the focus of the accounts contained in the book.

Defence date: 9 January 2009 ; Examining Board: Prof. Donatella della Porta (EUI/External Supervisor); Prof. Laszlo Bruszt, EUI; Prof. Sidney Tarrow, Cornell University; Prof. Carlo Ruzza, University of Leicester ; First available online on 12 March 2019 ; This doctoral thesis aims to trace the impacts of campaigns carried out by coalitions of social movement organisations in the transnational arena of the EU. In order to accomplish this task, an original approach to process tracing is adopted using methods used in social movement studies. The internal aspects of campaigns are investigated using a dynamic, cross-time and multi-level, frame analysis, while the contexts of the campaigns are analysed through political and discursive opportunity approaches adapted to the peculiarities of the EU arena. Four case studies, including two campaigns concerned with environmental / public health policy (GMOs and coexistence, and the REACH legislation) and two concerned with broadly defined social policy (the mid-term review of the Lisbon agenda and the Services directive), make up the empirical part of the study. Drawing on documentary evidence as well as semi-structured interviews with staff members from the core SMOs involved in each campaign at the Brussels level, the processes leading to access, agenda, or policy outcomes (or indeed non-outcomes) are traced using the analytical methods mentioned above. These processes provide the basis for preliminary conclusions on the nature of campaigning in the EU. Elite allies are found to be important in securing desired outcomes in campaigns, as are solid, previously agreed shared frames between coalition organisations. The cases also show that the EU is not an arena where conventional tactics (i.e. lobbying) are always enough – indeed the ability to campaign effectively at multiple levels using appropriate tactics is identified as a major factor in campaigns that saw positive outcomes. This finding challenges the idea that the EU arena is unsuitable to protest actions (e.g. Marks and McAdam 1996). Finally, the study uncovers the beginnings of a divide between 'technical' and 'political' campaigns in the EU. Stemming from the finding that national contexts still provided the opportunities or threats that appeared most important in campaign outcomes, the cases showed that where campaigns were more 'political' - in that they were more ideologically charged - groups were more likely to be able to mobilise grassroots members and secure their desired outcomes. In more 'technical' cases, where the European Commission played a greater role, mobilisation efforts were subdued as groups sunk their resources in long cycles of consultation and knowledge production geared to the needs of the Commission.

This article explores the meanings attached to the participation of indigenous peoples and local communities articulated in the decisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Participation in multilateral environmental agreements by local groups is argued by proponents of civic environmentalism to be crucial in achieving fair and effective policies for environmental protection (Bäckstrand and Lövbrand 2016, Sconfienza 2017). According to this reasoning, equitable environmental governance can only come about through participation in policy formation by a range of stakeholders whose standpoints and ideas are taken into account. A challenge to this line of argument comes from more radical schools of environmentalism that posit the need to move beyond market economy thinking in order to protect the environment. In this reading, merely 'tweaking' the current market system to accommodate the value of the environment will not save the planet since it cannot address the fundamental power imbalances that have brought humanity to the brink of disaster in the first place. By exploring the meanings of participation, this article will contribute knowledge to discussions about whether the types of participation outlined in the CBD would allow better and more just policies to emerge, as suggested in the civic environmentalist approach, or whether a more radical approach to overcoming power imbalances might be necessary. Our analysis uncovers 30 different frames for participation, amongst which frames describing mechanisms for participation are the most frequent. Over time, there is an increase in talk about participation, though a clear high point emerges at the 7th meeting of the parties in 2004. Participation is foreseen at the domestic and international levels in more or less equal proportions, yet the local level is singled out very rarely. While an overarching, 'zoomed out' perspective of our findings suggests a positive trend in terms of the steady increase in provisions mentioning or more directly addressing ...

With no formal division between majority and opposition in the parliamentary arena, the European Union (EU) calls for an approach to political opposition which considers the role of civil society. This article explores the case of opposition to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) within and without the European Parliament (EP) through a political opportunity approach, using the case to reflect on conditions for effective opposition in the EU. The ACTA campaign saw opposed actors within the EP and digital rights groups work together to build coalitions against the agreement. Protests then opened the way for these groups to broker a change of position among other actors, allowing a majority rejection. The ACTA case suggests the need for advocacy by organised groups both within and without the Parliament to construct majorities. Comparisons to similarly successful campaigns bolster this view, as do examples of less effective opposition. ; SCOPUS: ar.j ; info:eu-repo/semantics/published