COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS AS TOOLS FOR RESISTING EXCLUSION IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE

This paper analyzes the rise of the community protocol approach under the access and benefit-sharing (ABS) transnational governance arena, to understand how local initiatives translate a global environmental regulation. This paper contributes to the literature on transnational governance by showing how this is constituted by a series of translation processes and each time a concept is introduced in a transnational arena and then translated by a community or organization, it gains new forms and uses depending on the interests and experiences of the actors involved. However, the same concept used for the same goal by communities in different parts of the world led to different concrete outcomes, which points to the idea that the outcomes in translation processes are not only ongoing but also unpredictable. In addition, the cases illustrate that in the process of actively translating a global regulation, the local actors themselves also change. Finally, the emergent findings show how community protocols were translated to become translocal tools to resist exclusion in environmental governance through two main mechanisms: connecting goals and practices and (re)connecting social networks.


INTRODUCTION
Historically, the exploitation of natural resources and associated traditional knowledge has been contentious (Banerjee, 2003;Escobar, 1998). Take the generic case of a small community in the Amazonian forest that has, for time immemorial, utilized the oils of a seed for medicinal purposes. A multinational company becomes aware of such knowledge and, without the consent of the community, patents it. This new patent brings no benefit to the community, while also hindering this community's access to the plant. This story has been repeated over and over again in many communities all over the world (Ostergard, Tubin, & Altman, 2001). Cases with similar story lines have been reported in South Africa, for the Hoodia Gordoni plant, patented as an appetite suppressant (Wynberg, 2004), in Madagascar, for the rosy periwinkle plant, patented for its properties that combat certain types of cancer (Wynberg, Schroeder, & Chennells, 2009), and in India, with regard to the different applications of the Neem tree (Banerjee, 2003).
NGOs and indigenous peoples' networks have denounced the unfairness of such practice (Takeshita, 2001), labeling it biopiracy, or the misappropriation of traditional knowledge (Roehrs, 2007). In a more positive outlook, this practice has been labeled bioprospecting, or the exploration of biodiversity for commercially valuable genetic and biochemical resources (Reid et al., 1993). Irrespective of the label applied, there is evidence that the research for natural products is usually directed by existing knowledge, often directly from indigenous peoples or local communities (Robinson, 2010). This has been referred to as traditional knowledge, or the knowledge held collectively by communities in the current, previous and potential use of plants and animals (Bubela & Gold, 2012). It is estimated that between 25 and 75 thousand plant species are used for traditional medicine and only 1% of these are known to scientists and utilized for commercial purposes (Aguilar, 2001). Traditional knowledge plays an important role in the discovery of new leads for the development of drugs and also in the marketing argument for exotic products (Laird & Wynberg, 2008). However, few indigenous peoples have ever received any kind of benefit from these technological developments and some have even experienced further exclusion in being denied access to knowledge or plants that have become privatized (Wynberg, 2010). The public outcry of NGOs, indigenous peoples and local community networks has denounced the unfairness and the persistent inequality in corporate and indigenous encounters (Roehrs, 2007).
Access and benefit-sharing (ABS) initiatives are at the center of attempts to redress these situations (Morgera & Tsioumani, 2010). Used as instruments to achieve distributive justice, ABS initiatives prioritize the consent of involved actors and the distribution of the benefits resulting from the exploitation of natural resources (Morgera & Tsioumani, 2010). In 2010, a transnational regulation, the Nagoya Protocol, was created to regulate ABS of genetic resources under the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD). This protocol proposes the establishment of mechanisms to ensure prior informed consent and mutually agreed terms between providers and users, and a monitoring system to ensure international compliance. Benefits derived from ABS agreements on these grounds are assumed to play an important role in financing biodiversity conservation in developing regions of the world and in alleviating poverty in disenfranchised communities (Greiber & Moreno, 2012). However, critiques point out that ABS initiatives involving traditional knowledge usually fail because they adequately reflect neither indigenous community needs nor culture (Whiteman, 2009), especially in cases in which the actors are not included their formulation (Wynberg, 2010).
Interestingly, one of the safeguards included by these groups during the negotiations of the Nagoya Protocol was the recognition of local governance schemes known as community protocols (Bavikatte & Robinson, 2011). These local governance schemes take part of the broad constellation of regulations (Djelic, 2011) involved in governing ABS. Community protocols are based on local governance, which includes indigenous practices, customs and beliefs around the ways of dealing with biodiversity conservation and traditional knowledge transfer (Bavikatte & Robinson, 2011). This experience goes beyond having diverse voices at the negotiation table because it creates connections and learning opportunities for engaged participants to co-produce and implement policymaking. It can be seen as both a response to top-down approaches of environmental regulation and also as a form of resistance to current business and academic bioprospecting practices that often disrespect and disregard traditional communities. In this sense, this could be seen as an inclusive tool for the disenfranchised.
A close examination of the strategic practices of communities in the context of ABS governance points to the plurality of possibilities in a setting where no single actor can impose a unilateral solution. In this paper, I build on the sociology of translation literature to go beyond diffusion metaphors of "the global imposing itself to the local" (Escobar, 2008;Latour, 2005b).
Global regulations indeed travel around the world (Djelic & Shalin-Andersson, 2006), but they only materialize when they are locally translated (Czarniawska, 2012). Translation is a transportation combined with a transformation (Latour, 1987), which entails the "creation of a new link that did not exist before and modifies in part the two agents" (Latour, 1993, p. 6). In that sense, not only the practices of communities further concretize the Nagoya Protocol, but in the making of these initiatives, actors' ways of organizing are also modified. In this process, communities enable themselves to perform a form of translocal resistance, whereby they "forge a series of temporary coalitions with international and national groups in an attempt to promote some form of participatory democracy" (Banerjee, 2011, p. 233). These transnational assemblages, which refer to the multiplicity of local spaces and actors and their interrelationships in a global world, translate global regulations in transgressing and transcending what is already in the local (Banerjee, 2011). These processes are extremely relevant in transnational governance studies because they have the potential to change the local-global dynamics, but so far are not well understood.
In this article, I focus on the rise of the community protocol approach under the ABS environmental governance arena, to understand how local initiatives translate a global environmental regulation. To do that, I first briefly present the sociology of translations literature. Secondly, I describe the emergence of the concept and present three different implementation experiences in South Africa, India and Peru. I then examine these experiences to understand how these communities have been developing and making use of the community protocols. I finally discuss the findings in light of the contributions of the translation lens to the transnational governance literature. The contribution of this paper is to provide a more nuanced view of the processes of transnational regulation building by shedding some light on the mechanisms through which local initiatives recursively connect with such global arenas.

ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF TRANSLATIONS
The sociology of translations literature has spread as a tool capable of investigating the processes and practices of organizing (Gehman, Treviño, & Garud, 2013;Nicolini, 2011).
This analytical focus stems from its relational ontology, which flattens out dualisms and revisits agency as emerging from social and material relations (Latour, 2005;Orlikowski & Scott, 2008).
Its original understanding of the nature of reality and knowledge is based upon the assumption that any form of social order is the result of active connections between actants regardless of the idea of pre-existing levels of reality (Nicolini, 2009). An actor or actant, in ANT language, is "any thing that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference" in some other's action (Latour, 2005, p. 71). This is not to say that things determine human action, but they can surely allow, influence or even block actions performed by other actants (Latour, 2005). As a result, emphasis is given to the translation processes that sustain connections between the social and material worlds, instead of taking these connections for granted (Czarniawska & Hernes, 2005;Feldman & Orlikowski, 2011).
The source of inspiration for the first studies in this tradition was Michel Serre's notion of translation and the work on rhizomes by Deleuze and Guatari (Latour, 1999). Often used as a metaphor to explain the movement of management ideas and practices across organizations and nations (Czarniawska, 2009;Czarniawska & Hernes, 2005;Czarniawska & Sevón, 1996), translation entails the idea of transformation to account for how particular orderings are established (Latour, 2005). A chain of translation is the articulation of identities, interests and practices through the definition, association and negotiation among unrelated elements (Harrisson & Laberge, 2002). This idea entails a continuous effort of holding these pieces together and reconciling contraries (Gherardi & Perrotta, 2011;Latour, 1996).
In studies of globalization, more often than not, global and local interactions have been depicted as a process of compression of the world (Robertson, 1992). In contrast, the concept of translation helps us understand how these encounters produce opportunities of constructing something new and of changing what is translated but also the translator (Czarniawska, 2012, p. 27). It has been used to move away from the diffusion model of the institutional approaches and to draw attention to the way that ideas (norms, rules, practices), rather than moving along unchanged, are inevitably modified as they travel in space and time (Zilber, 2006). In an application of this theoretical lens, Maguire and Hardy (2009)  Although the secondary data used to describe the illustrative cases is very rich, a common shortcoming in this type of data is that the information made available may be influenced by the role and interests of the actors producing the material (e.g. the case studies were written in co-authorship between the NGOs and communities involved in the experience). To minimize this limitation, as part of a broader research program, the author conducted other six interviews with experts to understand the history and the impact of the community protocols locally and in global environmental governance discussions. For the data analysis, I started with first-order open coding of all documents (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). This method is well adapted to theory-building (Gioia, Corley, & Hamilton, 2013). A total of eight initial categories emerged from the data. I then created second-order themes by clustering the first-order descriptive codes according to their qualitative similarities, generating four different themes. In a final effort to abstract from these emergent themes, two mechanisms are proposed to understand how the local governance schemes interact with the global regulation on ABS. The mechanisms found in the coding process are common to all three cases because communities appropriated the tool locally in a similar way, even if outcomes were somewhat different.

THE EMERGENGE OF COMMUNITY PROTOCOLS
Communities around the world have been developing and using a wide range of protocols, procedures, rules and practices to guide their interactions within their communities, between communities, with external actors, and with the environment for hundreds of years. The novelty of the emerging community protocol approach resides in the fact that it is a process of systematization of local practices and regulations that is recognized under a global regime, the Nagoya Protocol. Despite the hermetic dynamic imposed by the rules of procedures adopted in intergovernmental negotiations at the United Nations, the mobilization of many actors in the context of the Nagoya Protocol's negotiation resulted in the inclusion of a potential safeguard for protecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local community groups in local implementation (Bavikatte & Robinson, 2011). The Nagoya Protocol, in its article 12.1 requires countries to support the development of community protocols, a concept that is not well defined in the Protocol text. The idea of community protocols was not entirely new because some communities were already putting it into practice under different labels. This is recognized by Natural Justice's members directly involved in the Nagoya Protocol's negotiations, who also justified the need to create this new concept: Natural Justice did not invent the term or the concept. Important work had already been done in Latin America. I think the precursor of the concept was "Plan de vida", applied in the Potato We realized that the Nagoya Protocol can be used as a tool of conservation of traditional knowledge. We researched on experiences all over the world and we saw that some of them are related to conflict mediation with the mining and logging sectors. We already had some experience with a certification process for our products, which required a socio-participatory process to determine the use of our land and resources. With this experience we saw an opportunity for us in creating a community protocol with our own methodology to respond to an internationally recog-

Exhibit 2. Methodology for community protocol building
• Building credibility, trust and mutual respect among traditional healers.
• Identifying the healers' concerns and values and ensuring they are fully understood by asking probing questions and reflections.
• Facilitating consensus among the healers by ensuring that all opinions are heard and considered.
• Making sure all participants are part of the process and ensuring they feel part of a shared vision.
• Capturing and reflecting to the group decisions that are owned by the healers.
• Ensuring participatory and fair practices throughout the process.
Encouraging all members of the association to express their views and be involved. The relationship with government officials has also changed.
On the one hand, the association was able to negotiate for limited access to protected areas due to the recognition that local healers are not responsible for extensive overharvesting (Sibuye et al., 2012). On the other hand, the association has also created a code of ethics for its members which aims to improve the consistency of service to clients and help members in the process of registering with the South Africa Department of Health as officially recognized traditional health practitioners (Sibuye et al., 2012).

Case 2: Raika Livestock Breeders
The Raika community protocol of 2009 is thought to be the first Justice. An implication of this is that the community is currently in need of a local lawyer to support the ongoing process of refining and using the Raika protocol, which has proved a very difficult task (ARIBCP, 2011).
In terms of outcomes, the Raika have used the document when interacting with government officials, particularly the Forest Department (ARIBCP, 2011). It has been useful for the Raika to have a written document in hand to illustrate their ways of life and rights in meetings with government officials. It has also been particularly empowering for Dallibai Raika, the woman from the community who has been traveling internationally to present the protocol and advocate for their rights (ARIBCP, 2011). Moreover, there has been a replicating effect. Many other pastoralist communities followed the idea and started drawing their own community protocols based on the Raika experience.

Case 3: Potato Park in Peru
Six Quechua communities created the Potato Park in 2002 around the philosophy of Andean indigenous cosmovision: Sumaq Causay, which means "harmonious existence" or "a way of living together in community" (Argumedo, 2012) The community felt the need to create a mechanism to ensure equitable sharing of seeds and other benefits derived from this agreement and from other economic activities in the park (e.g. tourism, handicrafts, gastronomy, agriculture, natural products) in order to prevent disputes amongst the communities (Andes, Potato Park Communities, & IIED, 2012). The inter-community agreement aims at building the "foundations for equitable and sustainable local economies based on biocultural goods and services, while building communities' capacity to negotiate equitable agreements with third parties" (Andes et al., 2012). This agreement is an example of community protocol because it regulates the benefit-sharing activities among internal and external actors, but also because it is based on their customary laws (Andes et al., 2012). In the second phase, the main objective was to identify and document customary laws and the underlying principles concerning access to biocultural resources and the equitable distribution of benefits within the Potato Park. Community members and the facilitators conducted this research through the establishment of small study groups. The communities identified three key Andean customary laws -reciprocity, duality and equilibrium -that should apply to benefit-sharing. In this phase, Asociación ANDES also trained 14 indigenous researchers representing each of the communities to jointly undertake the research project. (Andes et al., 2012) In the third phase, the main objective was to expand community participation through the implementation of a consultation and revision process involving local authorities and community members. In the final stage, the newly trained indigenous researchers and ANDES staff validated the final document with the communities (Argumedo, 2012).
Since the establishment of the inter-community agreement, the communities have equitably shared the benefits from many activities centered in the conservation of native potato diversity and the traditional knowledge associated to it (Andes et al., 2012). The communities maintain a system to evaluate the contribution given to the different activities of the park (Andes et al., 2012). The protocol also provides guidance to external actors who want to engage with research in the park. While the communities agreed to maintain the free flow of resources and TK amongst them, TK and bio-genetic resources can only be exploited by external actors with the prior informed consent of the six communities (Andes et al., 2012).

EMERGENT FINDINGS: RESISTING TO EXCLUSION IN GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE
In the data analyzed for the three cases, the process of creating these protocols in a translation of the Nagoya Protocol at the local level enabled communities to resist exclusion in environmental governance through two main translation mechanisms (Exhibit 5): by connecting goals and practices and (re)connecting social networks. After presenting these mechanisms, I summarize the outcomes of the translation processes in the three different settings.

Mechanism 1: Connecting goals and practices
In all three experiences, communities made the effort of The community protocols included articles from human rights law, the right to food, the FAO International Treaty and the CBD, which have been ratified by the national governments where the communities live. In that way the community protocols stress the point that they are helping national governments to implement internationally held commitments at the local level.
With that, they also embed the global into the local reality.

Mechanism 2: (Re)connecting social networks
In the struggle to assert their rights, the experience of community protocol building enabled communities to connect and re-connect social networks. In doing this exercise, the communities had to define the boundaries of their groups to be able to articulate their views internally. Self-determination is a principle under Article 3 of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that provides a community with the right of self-definition as a group that considers itself to be affiliated through a commonality (or commonalities) of subjective importance to the community. Each group decided to define community either based on landscape or common knowledge and activity, not necessarily on political, linguistic or ethnic criteria. In the case of the traditional healers in South Africa, despite the large geographical distances between Sepedi and Tsonga ethnic communities and their two separate languages, the process of developing a protocol has helped them to re-define themselves as a group with shared values and knowledge (Sibuye et al., 2012). Interestingly, the protocol document is written in English and the other 2 indigenous languages.
We are a group of over 80 traditional health prac- Community Protocols also support relationships within a given community by building a common understanding of the current situation and establishing forward-looking goals. This is achieved by evocating common principles and beliefs but also through the process of in-depth discussions that allow for cohesion building (Argumedo, 2012).
The communities agree that benefit sharing will be fair and equitable, with the goal of promoting

Outcomes of the translation processes
From the three illustrative cases presented here, the only case that concretely led to an ABS agreement with a business company was the one of the traditional healers in South Africa. The community protocol enabled the community to start engaging in a partnership with a local company, allowing research to be conducted on some of the Healers' traditional knowledge with the aim of developing various cosmetics. This can be seen as an experience where the Nagoya Protocol was effectively implemented at the local level.
However, even if the other experiences have not resulted in ABS agreements so far, they are all successful in their own terms because the communities were able to create an instrument that translates the Nagoya Protocol locally (Czarniawska, 2012)

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUDING REMARKS
The translation perspective draws our attention to the situated and micro mechanisms by which ideas travel (Czarniawska & Sevon, 1996;Djelic & Sahlin-Anderson, 2006). The studies in this tradition explore the active process involved in shaping ideas in different settings (Sahlin-Anderson, 2000) and how this is an ongoing process (Maguire & Hardy, 2009 Finally, this paper contributes to reveal the mechanisms through which an idea that is re-translated from the global to the local level helps communities to resist practices that undermine their sustainability (Banerjee, 2011 connecting goals and practices and (re)connecting social networks.
On the one hand, community protocols interweave national and international diffuse goals and practices underlying sustainability discourses with customary law and traditional practices. In strategically connecting legitimate national and international frameworks, the communities are in a position to hold outside actors accountable to their customary laws and to enforce the respect for their local sustainability principles and goals. In the Potato Park case, the principle of prior informed consent, fostered under the Nagoya Protocol and the ILO 169 convention, enables Quechua farmers to continue to freely grow food as long as they protect biodiversity. This means that the force of the community protocols rely on their connections to modern legal systems (Latour, 1993).
On the other hand, community protocols also make visible the ways of life, conservation practices and situation of communities, firmly re-constituting these communities as protagonists in their relations with nature but also with external actors. One could argue that much international and national environmental legislation is articulated in a way that further deepens inequality through its focus on economic valuation (Banerjee, 2003). However, community protocols hold the potential to confront inequality with an alternative model that prioritizes the well-being of communities and nature over the potential generation of profit for third parties. By gaining greater awareness of the prevailing, enabling and challenging external forces and by actively engaging in or resisting some connections with external actors, communities negotiate a new role in global environmental governance.
Importantly, local communities in different parts of the world have been engaging with transnational governance, by connecting themselves with transnational actors and treaties (Djelic & Quack, 2010). The cases presented here show how the bridging process between global and local arenas is most likely to be initiated by an ally, either a local or a transnational NGO.
This dynamic points to the difficulty of communities to articulate themselves in the global realm and the need for a carrier (Djelic & Sahlin-Anderson, 2006) who imports the global concept into the local community. The carrier takes on a facilitator role, which may take different forms depending on the conditions of the community but also on the visions of the facilitator organization in how this bridging process should intervene in the local level.
In the three cases presented, none of the community protocol processes was initiated and executed by the communities themselves but by NGOs. In particular, in two of the three cases Natural Justice, the NGO championing the concept, played a key role in facilitating the process of community protocol building by proposing a methodology that was followed by communities.
However, in the Peruvian case there was a special emphasis in local capacity building by engaging community members in the research team and creating a homegrown approach. Even though the data available does not explicitly show, it is fair to assume that the way in which communities are engaged in the process of constructing their community protocols might affect the legacy for communities in terms of how well they are prepared to face the challenges of connecting themselves to transnational governance.