Friday, October 30, 2009

Books, Articles and Online Publishing







  • Natural Justice partnered with the United Nations Environment Programme, UNEP, to co-publish a comprehensive book on Bio-cultural Protocols. The book was a major project, and will be launched at side events at both the Working Group meeting on Article 8j and the 8th meeting of the Working Group on ABS held in Montreal, Canada in November 2009. The book pooled the resources of several authors working with or associated to Natural Justice, who wrote about BCPs in concept and practice in different contexts throughout the world. The book has allowed Natural Justice to consolidate the work being done on BCPs with communities and give it greater exposure. Natural Justice is grateful to UNEP for providing funding for this publication, and for partnering with Natural Justice in this project.
    The authors of the book were: Elan Abrell, Kabir Bavikatte, Harry Jonas, Ilse Köhler-Rollefson, Barbara Lassen, Gary Martin, Olivier Rukundo, Johanna von Braun and Peter Wood.
    You can view a PDF of the entire book here:
    Bio-cultural Community Protocols: A Community Approach to Ensuring the Integrity of Environmental Law and Policy

    A second book was also published in partnership with the International Development Law Organization to be released at other side events at the same conferences. This monograph introduces the Traditional Knowledge Commons, a concept being explored and developed by Natural Justice together with experts in the fields of Intellectual Property and TK. This book is building on the licensing system already in use in other contexts, but never before used in application to TK, which allows users of TK to access TK with the agreement that research papers and other works will be put back into the commons for other users to access, and that the TK accessed will be for non-commercial use. Natural Justice is grateful to IDLO for the financial support for this partnership project.
    The authors of the book were: Elan Abrell, esq, an associate of Natural Justice, and a doctoral Candidate, Department of Anthropology,City University of New York. Kabir Sanjay Bavikatte: Co-Director of Natural Justice. Kabir is also a PhD candidate in the Department of Private Law, University of Cape Town. Gino Cocchiaro: Legal Researcher, International Development Law Organization (IDLO), Harry Jonas is Co-Director; Natural Justice and Andrew Rens: Intellectual Property Fellow,
    Shuttleworth Foundation
    A PDF of the entire book can be viewed here:
    Imagining a Traditional Knowledge Commons: A Community Approach to Sharing Traditional Knowledge for Non-commercial Research

    Kabir Bavikatte also collaborated in writing the following articles recently:

  • A short article on Biocultural Protocols for the brackets magazine produced by the NGO group at the ABS negotiations

  • A short article on TK Commons for the brackets magazine produced by the NGO group at the ABS negotiations

  • A chapter on TK and Human Rights for a forthcoming book on Traditional Knowledge to be published by UNEP.

In addition, Natural Justice have collaborated in developing a Traditional Knowledge Commons website, which is still in the development stage. In addition, the Natural Justice website itself has been updated, with many exciting new features added.

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