New ABS legislation and practice and compliance with the Nagoya Protocol

• Applicant: Dr. Evanson Chege Kamau
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: from 2017 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 328961029

This application is made in order to facilitate the completion of the ongoing research project on post Nagoya Protocol implementation of ABS legislation and practice. As already mentioned the study focuses on selected salient questions/issues that were not resolved during the negotiations in the run up to the Protocol, or which have arisen in the implementation stage, how they are being integrated in the new ABS legislation and practice as well as how these are coping with the new requirements and how they are performing. Likewise, being focused on is how they legally and practically comply with the obligations of the Nagoya Protocol. Further, selected issues are being discussed with the aim of exposing the challenges they pose to implementation. In addition, cross-cutting issues and legal transplants are being identified in order to find ways of resolving outstanding issues and enriching national ABS laws and practice across borders besides assessing the success of national approaches in achieving efficiency and effectiveness, and generating solutions for open, unresolved and emerging questions, which will be fed into the ongoing implementation and negotiation process. As a result of many national laws coming into force or being legislated in the course of the project as well as these becoming available late, the initial pieces of work had to be checked against the new provisions – when the project began only 4 countries from the selected 15 case studies had post-Nagoya Protocol legislations either as stand-alone laws or revisions to old ones. Right now we have 8 new legislations, 2 drafts and 3 ongoing revisions. Likewise practice took some time to get itself acquainted to the new measures and develop administrative approaches. Besides, issues focal to our research project e.g. on digital sequence information, cut-off points, non-commercial/commercial research, and limits of provider country rights, have gained more and more political and scholarly attention. As a result, the project has had to deal with new legislation and discourses in an attempt to come up with accurate, tangible and realistic solutions to still pending challenges. Whilst these developments give the project the opportunity to produce novel and state of the art results, they, on the other hand, have slowed its progress. Therefore, the aim of the renewal is to give the project manager (1) more time to induce partners to finalise their papers, (2) extra time to complete his own case studies and focal paper, as well as (3) the necessary time for editing the 26 contributions the majority of which are written by non-native English speaking researchers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants