Biocultural Rights, Indigenous Peoples, and Local Communities: Protecting Culture and the Environment

This lecture will investigate the role of biocultural community protocols in safeguarding the biocultural rights of Indigenous and local communities. In so doing, the lecture will analyse the nature and role of biocultural community protocols within the context of access to genetic resources and benefit sharing, linking this to the rise of biocultural jurisprudence and the interlinkages between cultural diversity and biological diversity conservation. The lecture will also provide critical insights about biocultural community protocols, raising questions including whether these protocols can be seen as political tools and representational strategies used by Indigenous peoples in their struggle for greater rights to their land, territories and resources, and for more political space.

About People, Plants and the Law Online Lecture Series

The People, Plants, and the Law lecture series explores the legal and lively entanglements of human and botanical worlds.

Today people engage with and relate to plants in diverse and sometimes divergent ways. Seeds—and the plants that they produce—may be receptacles of memory, sacred forms of sustenance, or sites of resistance in struggles over food sovereignty. Simultaneously, they may be repositories of gene sequences, Indigenous knowledge, bulk commodities, or key components of economic development projects and food security programs.

This lecture series explores the special role of the law in shaping these different engagements, whether in farmers’ fields, scientific laboratories, international markets, or elsewhere.