BENELEX project launched
Mon 14 April 2014
The BENELEX project explores the promises of benefit-sharing and the role of law in ensuring equity among and within States in addressing global environmental challenges. It investigates the conceptual and practical dimensions of benefit-sharing – a legal tool seeking to equitably allocate among different stakeholders the economic, as well as the socio-cultural and environmental advantages arising from the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources and their regulation. The project explores benefit-sharing as an under-theorised approach that can contribute to address inter-related global environmental challenges (such as climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation and the protection of the marine environment) by accommodating the special circumstances, cultural preferences and vulnerabilities of developing countries and of indigenous peoples and local communities. The green economy provides a frame for evaluating whether benefit-sharing may contribute to realizing equity among and within States in the context of efforts to enhance business development, job creation and public-sector savings related to environmental management.
The BENELEX project combines doctrinal and comparative analysis of international law developments under multilateral environmental, human rights and corporate accountability processes. This analysis is systematically enriched with real-world insights from the multilateral level through: participant observation in selected multilateral environmental negotiating sessions; organisation of international side-events at the margins of selected multilateral negotiations to gather feedback from negotiators from developing and developed countries, as well as NGOs, industry representatives and community-based organisations active at the multilateral level; and involvement of selected UN legal officers and NGOs that are active at the multilateral level in the project’s Advisory Board. In addition, to understand in a pragmatic and contextualised manner the role of benefit-sharing from the local to the global level, the project integrates empirical legal and political sociology research through fieldwork in India, Malaysia, South Africa, the Greek island of Ikaria and a country to be selected in Latin America.
The BENELEX website provides easily-accessible information about the project activities, and updates about its implementation. It features blogposts to discuss topical international law developments that are related to benefit-sharing; and starting from September 2014 a series of Working Papers to share the project preliminary findings among, and receive feedback from, a variety of stakeholders. In due course, the website will also featurepolicy briefs targeted to specific stakeholders (international negotiators; the private sector; NGOs advising communities and bilateral development partners) in English, French and Spanish and a training module for indigenous peoples and local communities providing practical guidance on operationalising benefit-sharing and concluding benefit-sharing agreements. The module will be developed by partner NGO Natural Justice and will be made available in English, French and Spanish. In addition, the BENELEX Twitter and Facebook accounts highlight new international documents, events, news and reports of relevance to benefit-sharing.
The BENELEX project is funded through a European Research Council Starting Grant made to Elisa Morgera, Director of the LLM programme in Global Environment and Climate Change Law. The BENELEX project runs from November 2013-October 2018.
BENELEX project updates can be obtained through:
- the BENELEX newsletters
- Twitter: @BENELEXedinburg
- Facebook: BENELEX