BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS - Portal do Professor

PART I / CHAPTER 2
Overall, BCPs are a statement by ILCs of their intentions to selfdetermine
their futures and explain to specific stakeholders
how they either wish to engage them or be engaged.
BCPs present an opportunity for communities to set out their
customary laws relating to FPIC regarding access to their TK
and/or GR and how they want to use new opportunities such
as the establishment of a protected area, a REDD project, or
a payments for ecosystem services scheme. 2
In doing so, ILCs
provide clarity to other stakeholders, better enabling
researchers of government agencies, for example, to work
with them towards the community’s proposals. Thus, BCPs
provide communities an opportunity to focus on their
development aspirations vis-à-vis legal frameworks such as
ABS and to articulate for themselves and for others the
processes that require support to protect their bio-cultural
heritage, and therefore on what basis they will engage with
potential users of their TK.
For example, Samburu livestock keepers from Kenya said the
following about the reasons for developing a BCP:
We are the Samburu, pastoralists living across a number of
districts in Kenya. We are keepers of indigenous and exotic
breeds of livestock and our lives are interlinked with and wholly
3. Community Experiences with BCPs
3.1 Self-determination and Governance
New legal and policy frameworks are providing communities
with new opportunities to use the law to protect their ways
of life, but at the same time are posing corresponding
challenges. The IRABS’ focus on TK raises questions about its
applicability to the way communities are defined and organized
locally. A certain type of TK can be known by a subset of a
community (traditional healers, for example), may be widely
shared between communities or might be used across national
borders. To respond to any issues relating to TK, the “community”
of TK holders must first define themselves and consider who
should make decisions relating to their bio-cultural heritage
and overall governance.
BIO-CULTURAL COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS AS A
COMMUNITY-BASED RESPONSE TO THE CBD
dependent on our animals. Our way of life also allows us to
live alongside wildlife, promoting the conservation of our
breeds and other living resources in our environment. Yet we
feel that our way of life and our indigenous breeds have been
consistently undervalued. The government-promoted breeding
programs that sought to replace or improve our breeds have
left us particularly vulnerable to the recurring droughts which
are causing our people acute suffering.
This is our community protocol. It is an articulation of the
integral role of our breeds in Samburu culture and their
importance to the world. It seeks to establish the significance
of our way of life and the value of our indigenous breeds, and
that as the keepers of important livestock populations, we
have a right to maintain our way of life. It clarifies for others
on what terms we will permit activities to be undertaken on
our land or regarding our indigenous breeds and
traditional knowledge. 3
The next section below illustrates the types of issues
highlighted by the communities as being important to their
ways of life and also provides an overview of the way in which
they have set out their values, concerns, challenges, and legal
rights in BCPs.
The issue of applicability to the local context had the most
impact on the traditional healers from Bushbuckridge in the
Kruger to Canyons Biosphere Region. At first, the organization
was introduced to a group of 6 people who run the
Vukuzenzele Medicinal Plants Nursery to discuss their rights
under the South African Bio-prospecting and ABS Regulations
of 2008. It soon became evident that there were many more
healers in the region who knew of each other but had never
met formally to discuss mutual concerns. As a result, a larger
group representing two different languages was invited to
the next meeting to discuss their ideas. At that and subsequent
meetings, they realized that they faced many of the same
challenges, including a lack of access to medicinal plants because
of over-harvesting by commercial harvesters, a lack of
2. Payments for ecosystem services are discussed in Chapter 6.
3. Samburu Bio-cultural Protocol (working draft). For more information contact Jacob Wanyama and Evelyn Mathias, LIFE Network (Africa) at evelyn@mamud.com
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