Between Rights and Markets: The Structural Limits of Indigenous Participation in the Emerging Biodiveristy Credit Market

Abstract

Biodiversity credits have gained significant traction as a market-based mechanism for mobilizing private finance toward conservation and restoration, yet the governance structures underpinning these markets have been largely established without meaningful input from Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC). This thesis examines the extent to which international Indigenous rights frameworks enable meaningful IPLC participation in biodiversity credit markets and the structural limitations that persist in practice. I argue that international Indigenous rights frameworks and biodiversity credit market governance operate on different foundational logics. Where rights frameworks are centered on collective rights, state obligations, and relational governance, market logic operates through the commodification of nature and transactional consent. This creates a persistent tension that existing frameworks were not designed to resolve. Through an analysis of ILO Convention 169, UNDRIP, and the CBD Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the thesis identifies a binding gap and sovereignty constraint embedded in the architecture of international law that structurally limits the transformative potential of Indigenous rights frameworks. An empirical evaluation of two biodiversity credit projects in the Ecuadorean tropical Andes – Savimbo's Chandia Na'en project and InvestConservation's Tapichalaca Reserve – further demonstrates that this misalignment is not merely theoretical but manifests concretely in project governance, where commitments to FPIC, equitable benefit-sharing, and Indigenous governance authority are often procedural rather than substantive. The thesis concludes that bridging this gap does not require new rights frameworks but deliberate adaptation of existing ones, and that the infancy of the biodiversity credit market represents a critical window of opportunity to meaningfully embed genuine IPLC participation in market governance before its architecture further matures.