Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
The protection of biodiversity through an international treaty underpinning a global regulatory regime has been accepted as the necessary legal and political structure for at least the last two decades. Based on a simple spatial and jurisdictional equation, the idea that a globally defined environmental problem of biodiversity loss has to be addressed by a similarly global mechanism appears self-evident. But this belief in the scope and scale of international environmental law, in its formalist process and eventual substantive effectiveness, is a political truth that possesses its own history. How have we come to think that we need a global biodiversity regime? And what are the effects of this need? This book employs a Foucaultian genealogical method to present an expanded, detailed and critical history of the discursive and practical use of biodiversity in international law. Drawing from environmental history, philosophy of science, political economy and development studies, this book articulates the series of on-going tactical battles over the scientific, social, economic and political truths that constitute biodiversity as an object of knowledge and regulation. The production of biodiversityas a factual ecological truth cannot, this book argues, be separated from the processes of its social, economic, political and legal problematization.
Synopsis
This book employs a Foucaultian genealogical method to present an expanded, detailed and critical history of the discursive and practical use of biodiversity in international law.
Drawing from environmental history, philosophy of science, political economy and development studies, this book articulates the series of on-going tactical battles over the scientific, social, economic and political truths that constitute biodiversity as an object of knowledge and regulation. The production of biodiversities a factual ecological truth cannot, this book argues, be separated from the processes of its social, economic, political and legal problematization. The volume articulates a critique of the strategic use of environmental history as the declensionist history of ecological facts and concepts in the service of narrow strategic projects, such as the global biodiversity regime. It strategically uses the modified history of biodiversity to demonstrate that the Convention on Biological Diversity and its treaty regime constitute a fluid assemblage of constant struggle and not the given, self-evident and rational mode for the global structuring environmental action.
This volume will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Environmental Law, International Law, Environmental Studies, and Ecology.
Synopsis
This book presents a legal genealogy of biodiversity - of its strategic use before and after the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 1993.
This history of 'genetic gold' details how, with the aid of international law, the idea of biodiversity has been instrumentalized towards political and economic aims. A study of the strategic utility of biodiversity, rather than the utility of its protection under international law, the book's focus is not, therefore, on the sustainable or non-sustainable use of biodiversity as a natural resource, but rather on its historical use as an intellectual resource. Although biodiversity is still not being effectively conserved, nor sustainably used, the Convention on Biological Diversity and its parent regime persists, now after several decades of operation. This book provides the comprehensive answer to the question of the convention's continued existence.
Drawing from environmental history, the philosophy of science, political economy and development studies, this book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in Environmental Law, International Law, Environmental Studies, and Ecology.