Domestic biodiplomacy: navigating between provider and user categories for genetic resources in Brazil and French Guiana

Is the rationale of the convention on biological diversity (CBD)—the distinction between provider and user of genetic resources—outdated? While the response is in the negative at the global level, as demonstrated by the adoption in 2010 of the Nagoya Protocol, the provider–user distinction, if portrayed exclusively as a North–South relation, is no longer adequate to fully apprehend the political and legal dynamics at work in access and benefit sharing (ABS) regimes. Evolving configurations of this distinction can be found in a country that formerly saw itself solely as a provider (Brazil) and in a country that initially considered itself as both a user and a provider (France). In both cases, non-State actors (even if from the public sector) are reinterpreting the categories of the CBD for their own ends and are seeking to gain prerogatives related to the governance of genetic resources. That said, the trajectories of Brazil and French Guiana are quite different. While Brazil appears to be leaving behind an indiscriminate fight against biopiracy and entering a process of valorization of resources (led by the national scientific community), Guiana is shifting toward a locally governed regime that seeks to control as much as possible but which is difficult to put in place, even if arrangements have commenced on the fringes of official negotiations. Finally, the article shows that the content of ABS regimes is specified by the outcomes of local dynamics of biodiplomacy as much as by the stereotypical hypotheses discussed at a global level.