Biocultural Rights in the Biodiversity Regime: Relationality and the Limits of Instrumentalism

The biodiversity regime has attempted to navigate conflicting conceptualisations of human–nature relations, straddling instrumental, intrinsic and relational valuations of Nature. Yet, from the inception of the Convention on Biological Diversity, instrumental value has been given primacy, shaping not only the goals of the regime but also the tools it uses for implementation. Against this backdrop, this article traces the doctrinal emergence of biocultural rights within the Convention on Biological Diversity’s traditional knowledge architecture, focusing on Article 8(j) and the ‘family’ of related decisions as governance conditions. The article then examines the regime’s instrumentalist hegemonic valuation of Nature in practice. Access and Benefit Sharing act as one of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s main goals, while translating biodiversity governance into transactions organised around access, consent and benefit flows. Ecosystem services underpin the science–policy interface of the regime, and turn entire ecosystems into market mechanisms while rendering biodiversity governable through measurements and indicators. The result is a pattern in which relational commitments are repeatedly acknowledged while being filtered through economic and technocratic logics, risking performative pluralism. Finally, reading the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as a critical moment, the article argues that its implementation considerations must operate as a cross-cutting constraint on targets, indicators and finance, and that community protocols and mutually agreed terms can function as interfaces for legal and value pluralism. The key point is that resolving the regime’s tensions is less about choosing between diverse value systems, and more about clarifying how these value systems are meant to interact in practice.