Sustaining the Future Through Addressing the Past: The Transitional Justice Functions of Biocultural Community Protocols

Biocultural Community Protocols (BCPs) represent legal mechanisms for indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) to assert collective regulatory rights to genetic resources associated with traditional knowledge. BCPs inherently speak to power asymmetries between state and subnational actors. Yet the literature on BCPs has insufficiently engaged with questions of whether, how, and the extent to which BCP author communities utilise these protocols to demand redress for past harms which have constituted those asymmetrical power conditions. Seeking to connect scholarship on BCPs with the transitional justice literature, I explore three hypotheses positing mechanisms by which IPLCs are leveraging BCPs to assert transitional justice demands. I then evaluate these hypotheses through analysis of the 34 BCPs registered with the United Nations ABS Clearing House.