Commercialization of biodiversity: Processes, actors, and contestation in Ecuador, 1536--2001.

Abstract

This dissertation details how particular sets of socio-cultural and political-economic practices to control biodiversity, or bioprospecting, and forms of engagement with it, emerge in Ecuador. The dissertation uses historically based and theoretically driven approaches of political ecology and political economy to examine Ecuadorian bioprospecting. The dissertation expands political ecology theory by seeking to understand and describe the manner in which particular forms of biodiversity management---bioprospecting and concomitant biocommerce---are the result of political processes influenced and shaped by particular economic outlooks, primarily economic neoliberalism. The primary vehicle to accomplish the above is via a set of case studies of bioprospecting in Ecuador. This dissertation uses a <italic>multi-method research strategy </italic> bound together by one central approach: ethnographic case study. The dissertation brings together archival research, competitive intelligence research, discourse analysis of pharmaceutical actors, multi-site ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and sustained participant observation to yield comparative multidimensional and multi-actor analysis of bioprospecting in Ecuador. Accordingly, the dissertation elaborates how social relations enable and condition certain dogmas about what biodiversity is and what is being done to control it. The methods help reveal trends and findings common across the cases and further situate the necessary particularities of Ecuadorian bioprospecting. The dissertation demonstrates that it is possible and fruitful to conduct comparative case study research of bioprospecting. At the same time the dissertation reveals that such an activity is fundamentally subjective, given what is required to accomplish it. The dissertation further reveals that, while the bioprospecting projects subject to inquiry have yet to yield hits, they are generate market value in other ways, primarily through the creation of biological based databases that are commodified, sold and leveraged in the future. This last finding highlights that new science and capital partnerships are being forged and are unfolding. Collectively, the findings point the way for subsequent research on bioprospecting at near, medium and long-term horizons; as well as along research and policy lines of inquiry.