Community protocols as tools for resisting exclusion in global environmental governance

Abstract

This paper analyzes the rise of the community protocol approach under the access and benefit-sharing (ABS) transnational governance arena, to understand how local initiatives translate a global environmental regulation. This paper contributes to the literature on transnational governance by showing how this is constituted by a series of translation processes and each time a concept is introduced in a transnational arena and then translated by a community or organization, it gains new forms and uses depending on the interests and experiences of the actors involved. However, the same concept used for the same goal by communities in different parts of the world led to different concrete outcomes, which points to the idea that the outcomes in translation processes are not only ongoing but also unpredictable. In addition, the cases illustrate that in the process of actively translating a global regulation, the local actors themselves also change. Finally, the emergent findings show how community protocols were translated to become translocal tools to resist exclusion in environmental governance through two main mechanisms: connecting goals and practices and (re)connecting social networks.