The argument will be made that the different categories of traditional knowledge and of knowledge holders have remained vaguely LGX818 defined, which leads to overlap in the various laws that provide protection and

to local, regional and international conflicts. Further, national governments continue to play substantial roles in implementing benefit sharing schemes. It will be argued that these benefits must be passed on to the knowledge holding communities, if they are meant to become real stakeholders in such “bottom up” environmental governance schemes. Further, to have real effects for biodiversity protection, intellectual property based rights to traditional knowledge should not lose sight of the broader aims of the Convention on Biological Diversity and not become mere instruments

used at the central administrative level for royalty collection and opposition to patenting of local knowledge abroad, as important as these tasks may be. The article will use various examples from Southeast Asia with a particular focus on Indonesia to discuss the experiences thus far in linking traditional knowledge and biodiversity protection. International treaties for the protection of biodiversity Access to genetic resources and related traditional knowledge, the topic of this article, has been regulated in and is affected by several international agreements. The selleck compound most important are the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) concluded in 1992, the WTO Agreement on

Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of 1994 and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGR) negotiated under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Currently under discussion are further international framework provisions dealing with animal genetic resources and marine genetic resources (WIPO 2008, pp. 19–20). Perhaps most Cyclin-dependent kinase 3 important for the current paradigms for national and local governance related to genetic resources and traditional knowledge are several provisions of the CBD. The link between trade and commercial exploitation, on the one hand, and conservation and protection, on the other hand, is Tucidinostat purchase explicitly made in Article 1 that lists as objectives of the CBD “the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources, including by appropriate access to genetic resources and by appropriate transfer of relevant technologies, taking into account all rights over those resources and to technologies, and by appropriate funding.