The Last Call for the Minerva’s Owl: The Politics of the 11th Hour in Negotiating the Nagoya Protocol at the CBD COP 10 Meeting

Abstract

Rarely had international environmental fairness been given so much hope, and generated so much despair, as anxiety over the acceptance of a new multilateral agreement, the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit Sharing (the ABS Protocol), reached the highest point in the final hours of negotiations at the tenth meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Conference of the Parties (COP 10) held in Japan’s Nagoya, during October 18–29, 2010. Despite the preceding two weeks of intense negotiations between CBD parties, it remained uncertain until the very end of the overnight plenary session whether the new Protocol would pass the consensus-based approval of an UN meeting. Negotiations resembled an emotional roller-coaster, as positions between the biodiversity rich Global South and the financially rich Global North over the Protocol’s scope, genetic derivatives, and compliance mechanisms remained wide apart. Besides the Protocol, the approval of the plenary session was needed for two other crucially important documents, each contingent upon one another for acceptance — a new Strategic Plan containing conservation targets for 2020 and a new Resource Mobilization Strategy for meeting these targets. It appeared that developing countries, collectively owning more than 80 percent of the world’s biological diversity, had a bargaining leverage over the industrially developed world and therefore were unwilling to accept new conservation targets unless the ABS Protocol was also accepted and more finances were made available.

The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.

Hegel, Philosophy of Right, preface