Raiding the village pharmacy: The integration of equity into international environmental agreements

This thesis examines access and benefit sharing agreements, one of the three pillars of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the protection of traditional knowledge. It will show the Convention has failed to establish an adequate framework to promote the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples and genetic resources of parties to the Convention. It uses the framework created by Scott Barrett to measure regime efficacy to determine that the Convention was unable to promote access and benefit sharing agreements and examines the factors that lead to this failure. This thesis is accordingly broken down into six sections, the introduction, the framework for analysis, a description of the current state of affairs, a detailed analysis of factors that led to regime failure and how the integration of equity into the analytical framework can yield insight into the future of access and benefit sharing agreements. In the case of the Convention on Biological Diversity these requirements were either not fulfilled or incompletely fulfilled, setting the stage for the current failure of the ABS regime.