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The idea of biocultural rights strives to address the overall issues of indigenous peoples and local communities in relation to the environment and to conflate together the different rights needed to promote their self-government and conservation of cultural identity. Indeed, biocultural rights place themselves in the Anthropocene debate as powerful tools able to provide answers to both human rights and environmental issues. But their environmental focus might raise some issues. This chapter will explore the pros and cons of choosing the path of claiming biocultural rights for, separately, indigenous peoples and local communities. They appear, in fact, as different subjects in international law whose positions are legally diverse. While indigenous peoples hold indigenous rights, a powerful, yet still too often ignored, trump in their hands to be used against States, international organizations, and business corporations, local communities are still fighting to receive protection under international law as a special group and regardless of their contribution to environmental considerations. This difference places them in dissimilar positions vis-à-vis the decision as to whether, or not, to frame their claims as biocultural rights claims.

This paper focuses on one of the answers that have been given to the question: what type of change is to be pursued to limit human impact on the Earth while considering the needs of poor and disadvantaged communities? In particular it looks at a proposal that combines sustainable development approaches with market mechanisms and top-down technocratic responses: payments for Ecosystem Services frameworks. They have been criticized by many points of view and this paper questions, in particular, their very reliance on the market, questioning their appropriateness for the regulation of conservation activities and their interaction with local communities.

L'autrice del libro When Rights Embrace Responsibilities. Biocultural Rights and Conservation of the Environment risponde ad alcune delle questioni sollevate da Francesco Viola e Gianfrancesco Zanetti nelle loro recensioni, pubblicate in questo numero della rivista. L'autrice si sofferma inoltre su alcuni temi discussi nel libro che richiedono ulteriori approfondimenti e su possibili sviluppi del concetto di diritti bioculturali. ; The author of the book When Rights Embrace Responsibilities. Biocultural Rights and Conservation of the Environment replies to the comments raised by Francesco Viola and Gianfrancesco Zanetti in the present journal issue. She also dwells on some topics of her book which deserve further clarification and speculates on possible future developments of biocultural rights.

Literature is rich on whether and how rights are limited by external considerations, such as other rights or particularly important general interests. This article concentrates on what could be a different type of limit of rights: Internal limits stemming from the very foundations of a right. Its aim is to understand whether these hypothetically different internal limits actually collapse on the idea of internal limits of coherence theories; or whether they are equivalent, in terms of effects, to external limits to rights. In order to show the origin of the troubling with internal limits, the article begins with a brief introduction of biocultural rights of indigenous peoples and local communities and of the challenges they encountered, allegedly, because of the internal limits that rose from their foundations. It then concentrates on coherence theories and the internal limits they envisage, and continues with the analysis of two examples - freedom of expression and parental rights - in order to understand whether turning external limits into internal ones causes any change in the arising normative positions. Building on this thought experiment, it tries to explain which of the sui generis features of biocultural rights are, actually, due to their double foundation and which, instead, are generated by other, concealed operations. Finally, after recognizing the complexities of the idea of care and stewardship between two subjects/interests, it points out the more subtle implications of internal limits of rights, opening the way to considerations concerning the way legal concepts are used and interpreted.

In much of the conservation discourse, the interests of humans and biodiversity are still presented as conflicting, in a relationship where satisfying the needs of one would come to the detriment of the other. This trade-off ideology has been at the basis of the, for instance, fences and fines approaches to conservation, and in the most extreme cases has led to the creation of protected areas by evicting indigenous peoples and local communities, irrespectively of their actual impacts on the local environment. Emerging approaches informed by the notions of community-based conservation and biocultural diversity have advanced alternative (yet age-old) ways of understanding the relationship between people and nature, highlighting the positive role that indigenous peoples and local communities can play in the conservation of biodiversity. Community contributions to conservation are receiving growing recognition also in international legal, institutional and political frameworks. In this presentation, we review the main international instruments providing recognition of community action for conservation – such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, and the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas, as well as the IUCN Protected Areas Programme, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, and Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures. These instruments, increasingly, though still limitedly, provide at least some recognition and promotion of the fundamental role that Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas (ICCAs) play for both the conservation of biodiversity as well as local livelihoods. As economic and corporate pressures increase, legal recognition is especially important for the efforts of local communities and indigenous peoples in conserving their lands and livelihoods. Understanding the existing instruments, how to use them, and how they can be improved is thus key to furthering such efforts and supporting them into the future. 1) biocultural conservation; 2) Indigenous Peoples and Communities Conserved Areas (ICCAs); 3) international legal and institutional review ; peerReviewed