In 2016, negotiations of the Convention on Biological Diversity on access and benefit-sharing policies were shaken up by the emergence of digital sequence information (DSI) as policy issue. Open access to DSI on genetic resources in genetic databases is standard practice in data-driven biological research, but such access was argued to bypass access and benefit-sharing policies of the Convention. As Parties and observers had to take a position on governing DSI, this research investigated the influence of discourses on the negotiations through argumentative discourse analysis. Actors in international environmental negotiations mobilize ‘background’ discourses – both consciously and unconsciously – to define and ‘foreground’ issues, which in turn shape negotiation and decision-making processes. The analysis shows that existing discourses on access and benefit-sharing and biodiversity structured actors’ statements aimed at defining DSI, thus applying and redefining access and benefit-sharing principles in the context of DSI. Actors with similar and slightly varying interests formed discourse-coalitions on the basis of shared storylines. Developing countries formed a separate discourse-coalition to push for DSI regulation wherein ideas about sustainable development and environmental justice were integrated, and to a lesser extent about biopiracy (the notion that open access to DSI enables the misappropriation of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge). In response, developed countries adopted narratives put forward by industry and research, advocating that open access to DSI is essential for science, biodiversity conservation and sustainable development. A third coalition, consisting of Indigenous peoples and local communities and civil society, also mobilized environmental justice and biopiracy discourses, but more prominently a unique holistic discourse on nature. Finally, holistic and biopiracy discourses were marginalized in official negotiation documents, while scientific and sustainable development discourses were adopted in official negotiation documents. The research provides a novel understanding of the DSI-negotiations as discursive politics, and highlights how different positionalities in discourses structure and are structured by statements in this political arena.@en

Terwijl de natuur in rap tempo verloren gaat, ontstaat tegelijkertijd een wildgroei aan data afkomstig uit de natuur. Die data worden als gemeengoed gezien waarvan iedereen, waaronder natuurbeschermers, profiteert. Er ontstaan echter nieuwe vormen van digitale uitsluiting door ongelijkheden in onderzoekscapaciteiten, databeheer en datanormen met negatieve gevolgen voor internationale wetenschappelijke samenwerking en natuurbehoud. Producenten en gebruikers van data moeten daarom veel meer doen om de digitalisering van de natuur in juiste banen te leiden.@en

Data-centric biology is taking a great leap, thanks to developments in omics technologies and the ever expanding genomic sequencing databases which consist of so-called Digital Sequence Information (DSI). DSI is derived from the sequencing of living organisms such as microbes, plants and animals. These data in turn feed into machine learning approaches, which help to sophisticate engineering of living organisms. These developments go hand in hand with the Open Science movement that urges scientists to share their data as much as possible, following the principle that more data is always better and will lead to more scientific insights. However, these developments risk increasing the digital divide between scientists with access to sufficient resources to generate and analyse DSI in some areas of the Global North, as compared to scientists in resource-limited regions, mostly in the Global South (Leonelli, 2016). Without enabling conditions ‘open access to data’ does not guarantee ‘fair access to data’. The inability to ‘‘self-use’’ DSI (Scholz et al., 2021) means that researchers in the Global South have less scientific agency over DSI and priority-setting in scientific research. This disparity between the ability to access and create benefits from data has led countries in the Global South to demand compensation for the use of DSI that originated from their region. Although many agree that it is fair to compensate and emancipate resource-limited but biodiversity rich countries (Bagley, 2016), the main issue is how to arrange this. At the Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) past December, Parties agreed to develop a multilateral benefit-sharing fund to which users of DSI would contribute. This fund would then be used to invest in biodiversity conservation and scientific capacity building in the Global South. However the question remains how to distribute the yield of such a multilateral fund? We argue that a fair distribution should at least take into account the different capabilities of scientists in different countries in generating and analysing data. In this paper we will focus mainly on academic scientists and engineers in various regions, leaving other actors such as indigenous peoples and companies out of the distribution picture for now. In developing principles for a fair distribution of benefits from DSI, we propose these three conditions: • The burden of execution shouldn’t be put solely on individual researchers and research organizations in the Global North, but they have a duty to contribute • Fair distribution of benefits should contribute to fair distribution of scientific agency • Fair distribution of access implies that management of data is restructured to reflect the needs of the Global South@en