Nativitas: capitalizing genetic nationhood

Abstract

This paper explores the way in which national sovereignty is defined and constituted through the production of indigenous genetic resources and biovalue. Our central argument is that the commodification of vital matter is mediated through what we call processes of “nativitization.” Nativitization occurs at the intersections of nationhood and nature, particularly through national endeavors to define native biowealth, a process which is constitutionally sanctioned through various global agreements, most notably the Convention on Biological Diversity. Our analysis here explores the politics of nativitas played out within a particular national context, that of Finland and its recent attempts to define and lay claim to its nonhuman genetic resources.

Keywords:

• genetic resources
• biopolitics
• natural resources
• nativity
• national identity
• nonhuman nationhood

Introduction

[B]are life […] now takes center stage in the state's concerns and becomes, so to speak, its terrestrial foundation Nation-state means a state that makes nativity or birth […] the foundation of its own sovereignty (Agamben 1995, p. 116).

Our argument in this paper is that nations are so much more than, as Benedict Anderson once expressed it, “imagined communities” (1991). While the imagination and desire remain central to the project of nationhood, such imaginings are (and have always been) realized only through the mobilization of corporealities, “life itself.” As Giorgio Agamben expresses it above, nations are constituted not just through territory but via the forms of life in which sovereignty comes into being.

What we here call nativitas expresses the way sovereignty is predicated on claims concerning the origins, birth, and provenance – nativity, in other words – of life.1 One of the central forces today in the dynamics of nativitas is the drive towards national claims over novel forms of genetic wealth and resources. This paper locates and elaborates on these processes by exploring recent national efforts to catalog national genetic and species resources in Finland.

A number of critical analyses have looked on how novel bioeconomy is built on long traditions of Western biocolonialism aimed at securing national interests in global bioprospecting (Kloppenberg 1988, Parry 2001, Schiebinger 2004, Schiebinger and Swan 2004). Also, a number of analyses exist that consider how various imagined communities in forms of national identities are mobilized as rhetorical tools to ensure economic, political, and public interests and their mutual enrollment in various human biobanking programs (e.g. Rabinow 1992, Pálsson and Rabinow 1999, Simpson 2000, Waldby 2000, Fletcher 2004, Busby and Martin 2006). Finally, a number of ethnographies of science have analyzed how natural scientists and scientific practice become embroiled in regional–national politics of novel natures in their daily negotiations between funding bodies, international treaties, local research strategies, and plant and animal corporealities (Brush 1999, Waterton 2002, Hayden 2003).

Instead, and in contrast to earlier work, we elaborate on the way nativitas is foundational of nationhood by focusing on the institutional details of how novel natural–cultural relations are formed at the highest national level in Finnish governance of nature. We analyze how genetic resources programs aimed at fulfilling the national obligations deriving from the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are institutionally organized and how the genetic resources and their ownership issues are processually identified within the larger organizational topography of nature.

We argue that even if the global-scale networks of novel bioeconomies in themselves are becoming more visible (the CBD being a perfect example of the new politics over these networks) and redefining global relations, the same global process is re-forming the very societies that take part in this global exercise (with the notable omission of the USA) by forcing them to recount what these societies – bodies of nation-states – are made of. We are interested in how novel natural objects, national genetic resources, are “carved out” (Brown and Michael 2004) by their identification within national governing bodies and how this identification itself allows for renaturalization of Finnish society in the corporeality of nonhuman genes as nonhuman genetic nationhood.

This re-formation, the very literal rebirth of nation-states, works by making claims as to the origins of certain problematic corporealities – the way the sovereign orders and articulates the realms of nonhuman genetics within its jurisdiction and incorporates the novel nonhuman nationhood in the body of the state itself. In this process of nativitas we see a new set of relations forming new national social subjects and natural objects: relations, subjects, and objects that problematize earlier social–natural constitutions, and very literally call the outer settlements of society, the institutionalized powers over nature and the written Constitution, into question.

The study is based on participant observation in the ministerial bodies responsible for genetic resources issues during 2005 and 2006, interviews with the key members involved, and analysis of the official policy documents and drafts thereof that these institutions used and produced during the work. The participant observation was performed by the first author, who was granted an official role of a “silent participant” in five formal meetings of the Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) group working under the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF). He was not granted a say in matters officially discussed in the meetings, although he had access to the numerous draft documents and interim reports produced and circulated among the official members of the working group. Notes were coded by topics discussed, summaries of participants' speech, conflicts between parties' interests or interpretation of the documents involved. Field notes were compared to official minutes of the meetings afterwards in order to analyze differences in private and public representation related to genetic resources politics as well as the differences between implicit and explicit matters of concern. This offered insights into the otherwise unobtainable background and subtext of publicly released documents.

Complementing this participant observation, six of 10 members of the working group were individually interviewed, lasting from between one and two hours. Key members (the Chair and the Secretary) were interviewed at the beginning and the end of their two-year working period. Interviews covered themes concerning international and national biodiversity politics, the definition of genetic resources according to different stakeholders, the politics of ownership over natural bodies in Finland and elsewhere and the institutionally desired aims of the work performed in the group.

This is a case study of how a new national regime of “life” (Collier and Lakoff 2005) and territory (Sharp 2002), or technological zone (Barry 2001) and its objects are co-constructed by national biopolitics witnessed through its institutional biosociality (Rabinow 1999). To date, only a few countries globally have enacted any legal measures concerning the access and ownership of national genetic resources (excluding, of course, plant genetic resources which have been regulated by different international conventions such as UPOV already for decades). Forerunner countries in this respect include, for example, India, the Republic of Seychelles, Australia and Malawi. In Europe, Greenland is the only country to have passed a law in 2006 directly regulating the access, use and benefit sharing concerning the use of genetic material as part of biological resources.

Finland began genetic resource programs in 2003 (plants) and 2004 (animals) and is one of the currently active Nordic countries (among Sweden, Norway and Denmark) working towards systematizing its national political, legislative and scientific actions concerning the genetic material. As this work is still continuing, Finland serves as a model country for studying how regulative actions on nonhuman genetic matters are imagined and decided upon at a national level. This case study provides an important backstage view into the complexities of national governance of nonhuman life and the making of novel national populations, or the process of nativitas.

The nation's biowealth as nonhuman genetic nationhood

Biowealth in terms of genetic property has become a contested technoscientific creation and a novel terrain of future bioeconomies based on genetic material (e.g. Haraway 1997, Franklin 2000, Waldby 2000, Rose 2006, Waldby and Mitchell 2006). This new biowealth operates on a variety of scales from local research programs to global bioprospecting, involving, accordingly, a large network of actors that vary in size, shape, and potentiality in terms of agency. These networks have created new global genetic landscapes, many have recently argued (Parry 2001, Hayden 2003, Heller and Escobar 2003).

In the past 15 years, nation-states have become major stakeholders in nonhuman genetic resources networks as a result of several international treaties. The most important of these is the juridically binding international Convention on Biological Diversity, signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 (CBD). This convention was a watershed in terms of the identification of global rights concerning genetic resources. It defined genetic resources as a new potential source of biowealth for nations by granting the ownership of genetic resources to sovereign states that have ratified it. Although the CBD has initiated a large number of different subprograms aiming at the conservation of biodiversity at many levels (ecosystems, species, and traditional knowledge), it is Article 15, in which these rights are articulated, that constitutes the juridical core of this convention. It is the only article that can be interpreted as an international “hard law” part of the convention, thus delegating binding and incontestable principles of juridical rights and responsibilities concerning genetic resources to the parties:

Article 15. Access to Genetic Resources

1. Recognizing the sovereign rights of States over their natural resources, the authority to determine access to genetic resources rests with the national governments and is subject to national legislation.

As a result, the convention set the course for the creation of a multilateral global system for access to, and exchange of, nonhuman genes, wherein nations are obliged to calculate their genetic resources and enter this information, placing it within the reach of others (on terms that are not yet specified in the global system). Parry has noted that “[u]nder the terms of the convention, genetic material became constructed as a resource in its own right. These resources would form part of the patrimony of each nation-state, and each would have the right to exploit them as it saw fit if pursuant to several new protocols” (2001, p. 118, cf. Rabinow 1992 in discussion of the patrimonial nature of human biological resources in France).

What makes this new biowealth based on “genetic resources” so interesting is that, implicitly, no two countries can claim proprietorship to the same genetic material, since it now counts as part of the patrimony of each nation-state. According to the article quoted, genetic resources pertain always to a source of origin, and to enforce this point a group of technical experts is currently exploring the opportunities for specifying an internationally recognized certificate of origins.2 Also, the contracting parties have the legal obligation to identify their original national genetic material and to take legislative, administrative, or policy measures to foster research on genetic resources. The convention marks the first time nations have to catalog their own genetics in their totality.

In this process of global bioprospecting in the name of biodiversity conservation, all of the world's nonhuman genes gain a potential nationality. As a consequence, this new form of national biowealth forms also what could be called novel nonhuman genetic nationhoods. This process of identification of original national genetic material works as a global-scale genetic fingerprinting of all nonhuman life and inscribes national identities in their very flesh. We understand this global process as a perfect example of what Haraway (1997, p. 5, see also footnote 4) calls “the rebirth of nations” by technoscientific means.

The convention, thus, has become a new proxy and bottleneck in the international genetic trade, as local communities in biodiversity-rich countries organize to fight against what they call unrightful “biopiracy” by agro-biotechnological multinationals. At the same time, ill-defined national regulations are complicating the bioprospecting work for the companies too. As a result, some of the biggest agro-biotechnology companies have, for example, deliberately stopped their prospecting attempts in countries that have no national regulations or what they consider too broadly defined national laws concerning the access and benefit-sharing issues of genetic resources (personal communication with the R&D chief of the Danish Christian Hansen, November 2006).

What is then interesting in nations' attempt to protect their rights over genetic resources is how the value processes here work through nativitization processes of these novel forms of biowealth. The “value” – whatever kind of value this might be – of a genetic resource after the convention can be defined only in relation to its national origins. Because genetic resources belong under the power of sovereign nations, it is in a very literal way their possible regulatory institutions and national legal regulations that decide how the access to and any benefits derived from genetic resources are to be defined. The value of a genetic resource, in other terms, is now globally bound to the nation and its institutional arrangements concerning these new sources of biowealth.

As such, the value process for genetic resources works in an opposite way to the value derivation of biological resources in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with their bioimperialism. Earlier colonialist collections were about decontextualization and recirculation of species, worked with the principles of exoticization, and decontextualized information (Schiebinger 2004, Schiebinger and Swan 2004). The more exotic, hence decontextualized, a material was, the better (Parry 2004, p. 18). However, from the early twentieth century onward, collections have been becoming more systematized and concentrated and include more information than ever about the bioresources they contain.

The making of total inventories of nations' genes is under way in most of the ratifying countries. And in this process of global/national calculation, it is the nativization of genes in contrast to exoticization, contextualization in contrast to decontextualization, that matters – this is what we call nativitas, a process of nativization of novel natural objects as a part of global and state-driven policing of natures. It can be seen as a creation of novel global genetic nationhoods, as an unforeseen side effect of what started as a global recognition of ownership rights over natural resources. The process of nativitas is now foundational to a form of national identity – that of nonhuman genetic nationhood.

Our interest in the ongoing process of creation of this new global/national system of genetic nationhoods is how Finland, which ratified the convention in 1994, is currently in the process of establishing and defining its own genetic landscape and how Finnishness translates to material bodies of genetic resources through various practices of governance. Sheila Jasanoff has argued that “policies concerning the life sciences have become embroiled to varying degrees in more or less self-conscious projects of nation-building or, more accurately, projects of reimagining nationhood at a critical juncture in world history” (Jasanoff 2004, p. 7). According to her, this imagination is dependent on “the systematic practices by which a nation's citizens come to know things in common and to apply their knowledge to the conduct of politics.” She calls these culturally specific ways of knowing “civic epistemologies” (ibid., p. 9).

In empirically tracing these civic epistemologies of this novel biowealth and the nonhuman genetic nationhood it entails, our interest is in how both the subjects and objects of this nonhuman genetic governance are born, how the novel objects of nature called “genetic resources” are co-constructed through their shifting relations to regulatory institutions, policy work, and scientific identification programs in Finland. Political institutions set the limits of imagination for scientific as well as local civic epistemologies, for the institutional arrangements politico-juridically define the identity of genetic resources and make them available for further genetic calculation at different national levels and in different epistemological fields, scientific or “civic” ways of knowing about nature.

As such, regulatory institutions work as inscription devices (Latour and Woolgar 1979), which function as cultural–natural interfaces and make their objects available and responsive to certain areas of national politics. These arrangements are what Brown and Michael (2004) call “institutional animals” because these institutions themselves have a certain species identity. They and their policy-making practices are located within a larger national topography of institutional policing of nature, within which they have complex power relations to others. “Institutional animals” respond to specified political tasks that are delegated to them through an institutional chain of command and conditioned by national structures of political power. Accordingly, continuously shifting relations between these institutions form an important part of national biopolitics, a particular enactment of institutional biosociality (Rabinow 1999), that models and orders particular versions of “culture” and “nature” after them.

Quite simply, then, these institutions and their arrangements are interesting objects of study, since they make visible how particular versions of genetic nature in Finland are institutionally read and ordered, and how, as a consequence, they “carve up” novel natures. Thus, institutional arrangements make visible how the very corporeality of novel natures (such as genetic resources) is delegated and identified between different administrative arms of national governance. Brown and Michael (2004, p. 213) argue that these “practices of ‘identification and disidentification’ between regulatory agencies and the objects of their regulation have highly corporeal effects resulting in decisions which subsequently become embodied” in matters of nature.

Genetic resources, as the objects of governance, embody potentiality not only of novel forms of biovalue but also of novel forms of national identity in their nonhuman materiality. However, they are politically problematic objects, in that they are resisting attempts at their national governance – they do not entirely fit the current institutional management of other types of Finnish natural resources. As a consequence, as this paper will show, they have called into question regulative institutions and their boundaries, suggesting that boundary changes in the institutional governance of nature might be the only way forward if they are to be made a part of national bioproperty. Furthermore, they have also become politically dangerous objects: if national governance would be extended to encompass genetic resources, a rewrite of some of the Finnish Constitution would have to be considered.

By considering the institutional and Constitutional problems genetic resources pose to the Finnish state, we want to point to the question Agamben (2000, p. 7) has presented for any analysis of biopolitics:

Foucault's thesis – according to which “what is at stake today is life” and hence politics has become biopolitics – is, in this sense substantially correct. What is decisive, however, is the way in which one understands the sense of this transformation. What is left unquestioned in the contemporary debates on bioethics and biopolitics, in fact, is precisely what would deserve to be questioned before anything else, that is, the very biological concept of life […] This concept – which today presents itself under the guise of a scientific notion – is actually a secularized political concept.

The important question about “life” and related biopolitics extends here to the political separation of national and non-national genes. Genetic nonhuman nationhood is a thoroughly political form of life, in which the nonhuman genes brought under the bios are recognized as naturalized parts of the sovereign political community of nation-states, while those considered non-native are left out of it as non-political forms of nature – as naked life (zoê). One answer to the question of what kind of life is at stake in the biopolitical vision found in the text of the CBD can therefore be given at the outset: the articulation of sovereign power over the nativity of nonhuman life, or nativitas.

The institutional identity of national genetic resources

Similarity is an institution. Elements get assigned to sets where institutions find their own analogies in nature. (Douglas 1984, p. 55)

After the lengthy negotiations (e.g. Kloppenburg 1988, Shiva 1993, Pistorius 1997, Parry 2001) producing the exact wording of the Convention on Biological Diversity, what really was agreed upon was the signatory nations' power to exercise their sovereignty with regard to these new matters of biowealth. It was Article 15 of the CBD that recognized the full genetic sovereignty of the signatory nations, or the “parties.” However, mostly undefined were the limits of the convention with regard to the corporeal materials themselves.

Only some of the possible interpretations of genetic resources were explicitly excluded in Article 22 and in the subsequent meetings of the Conference of Parties (for example, in decision II/11, made in its second meeting in 1995): the CBD does not apply to some agriculturally important plant breeds, life forms agreed upon in other international treaties (see also Whatmore 2002, pp. 91–116), or human genetic resources. Otherwise it leaves their definition an unresolved issue.

The most exact definition of genetic resources within the convention is given in Article 2 of the CBD, where they are defined vaguely through their value as genetic materials, which in turn should contain hereditary units. The exact wording is this:

“Genetic material” means any material of plant, animal, microbial or other origin containing functional units of heredity.

“Genetic resources” means genetic material of actual or potential value.

Thus, in granting sovereign rights over natural resources in general, the Convention on Biological Diversity, ratified by Finland in 1994, left the operational definition of genetic resources a task of governmental exercise open to national definitions. Subsequently, each signatory country has proceeded according to its own political procedures to address the issue. What follows is an analysis of institutional making and unmaking of the identity of national genetic resources in Finland. How did the identification of nonhuman genetic resources become a matter of national politics?

On 21 December 1995, the Finnish Council of State issued a Decision-in-Principle on measures promoting the conservation and research of biodiversity. The aim of the decision was to promote cooperation between ministries and to define their respective responsibilities in the national implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Accordingly, the Finnish Ministry of the Environment was put in charge of overseeing the work on the implementation of the CBD according to the Decision-in-Principle.

Some months later, on 20 March 1996, the Ministry of the Environment appointed the National Commission for Biological Diversity, a broad-based body of representatives from all ministries, key sectors of trade and industry, and environmental organizations. This commission drafted Finland's first National Action Plan for biological diversity by the end of the year, as mandated by the Council of State Decision-in-Principle. Besides identifying a number of national action points for the implementation of the convention, it introduced the concept of sector-based responsibility as a principle in the management of biological diversity. This concept was a response to the Council of State's decision stating that each ministry is responsible for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity within its own field of jurisdiction. The National Action Plan declared:

The Decision-in-Principle states that each ministry is responsible for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity within its field of jurisdiction, as well as for making proposals for measures promoting biodiversity (under the principle of “sectoral responsibility”). (Kangas et al. 1997/8, p. 6)

This declaration was taken as a guiding principle and served as boundary infrastructure between the ministerial bodies. As a key political principle, it was adopted for ensuring that tasks are shared in a legitimate manner between the different bodies and their respective spheres of administration involved in the implementation of the CBD. Bowker and Star (2002, pp. 313–314) describe boundary infrastructures as doing

the work that is required to keep things moving along. Because they deal in regimes and networks of boundary objects (and not of unitary, well-defined objects), boundary infrastructures have sufficient play to allow for local variation together with sufficient consistent structure to allow for the full array of bureaucratic tools (forms, statistics, and so forth) to be applied.

Thus, with this concept, which works as one of the keystones for building the national institutional ecology in genetic governance, the national tasks related to implementation of the three main objectives of the CBD – the conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components, and fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources – were distributed over different national spheres of administration. The commission came up with 124 action points in total and identified the bodies of administration responsible for them. Of these action points, three directly concerned genetic resources.

These three action points suggested that national plant and animal genetic resource programs are needed to identify and organize the native Finnish genetic material and to secure genetic diversity of Finnish plants and animals. The commission also decided that, under the principle of sectoral responsibility, the task of realizing these action points falls under the mandate of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. In addition, the commission proposed that national legislation concerning the patenting of genetic resources and related rights of ownership should be kept up to date with respect to international developments, but no one part of governance was identified as responsible for this task.

Subsequently, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF) began slowly drafting programs for two kingdoms of nonhuman life. Plant and animal genetic resource strategies were drafted within plant and animal workgroups operating under the ministry. These were ready by 2001 and 2003, respectively, and the ministry delegated their realization to a large research institute operating under its aegis, Agrifood Research Finland (MTT), and to the Finnish Forest Institute (METLA). These institutions started their programs in 2003 (plants and forestry) and 2004 (animals). In addition, the National Board for Genetic Resources (NBGR), comprising experts in different areas, was established to oversee and guide the work done within the two programs.

This institutional arrangement says something important about how genetic material was initially interpreted and identified in the Finnish administration of nature, and how the national political epistemology works at the high levels of Finnish governance over nature. As the first National Commission judged genetic resources to belong under the sectoral responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, it also made a particular reading of their ontological nature. MAF's responsibilities are described as follows:

The Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry steers the policy on sustainable use of natural resources as part of the Finnish Government and the EU institutions and decision-making. The administrative sector of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry comprises agriculture and horticulture, rural development, forestry, veterinary services, control of foodstuffs of animal origin, fisheries, game and reindeer husbandry, use of water resources and land surveying. (Public description of institutional responsibilities; see http://www.MAF.fi/en/index/ministry.html)

What happens in this institutional recognition of responsibilities is a co-construction of a political power over certain activities of certain parts of nature and the definitions of power to define their identity. The description of the administrative sector then constructs its elements of governance under the figures of natural referents or “mute” objects of nature, for which it then is able to act as a representative or to which it gives a voice in the Finnish politics of nature (Douglas 1986, Latour 2004). With this institutional identification, genetic resources were first interpreted by the commission to belong to an administrative sector concerning only specific aspects of nature – those of cultivated plants or forests or those of domesticated animals. As a consequence, this is reflected also in the aims of the two national genetic resource programs drafted under its jurisdiction:

In its work, the group decided to limit the programme now presented to only the genetic resources pertaining to agriculture, horticulture, and forestry. (MAF 2002, p. 6)

The working group for animal genetic resources decided in the meeting on 5 Sep. 2001 that the preparation of the report should be extended to preparing the national programme for farm animal genetic resources. Of the farm animal species, the working group defined the programme to deal with bees, cattle, chickens, dogs, fur animals, goats, horses, pigs, reindeer, and sheep. (MAF 2004, p. 4)

The role of politico-juridical institutions as inscription devices mediating between nature and culture becomes nicely visible through a close look at the list of species and the way they are now related to each other. The crucial question to ask here is what agricultural plants and bees have in common, or bees with reindeer. The answer is, of course, nothing by their biological status as life forms or by their genetic makeup. In biological terms, they do not belong to the same main set of phyla (plant vs. animal kingdom) or family of species (bees in the phylum Arthropoda vs. reindeer in Chordata) in the standard (Linnéan) classificatory taxa. Genetically, they do not have a singular Finnish genetic condition (a gene or gene complex) that would connect them together in similarity and, inversely, would distinguish them from other nonhuman living beings within the national territory.

The connecting element in this random-seeming list of animals is their institutional location as agricultural species falling under the political jurisdiction of MAF. In this ordering of species, it is their status as agricultural objects of nature – an inherently economic relation – that gives them their connection as, and an identity of, national genetic resources. Already part of the social-economic order as heterogeneous forms of nonhuman life in the biological sense-making practice between species (taxa), they are now brought together under the concept of “genetic resources” by the initial boundary infrastructure enacted by the “sectoral responsibility” and initially effected by the political decision of the Council of State. Their new horizontal connection cutting across biological categories is fundamentally derived from their economic relation to the national order of things. The underlying economic relation between nature and culture defining the essence of the administrative sphere of the ministry gives this random-seeming collection of species their new ontological status as national genetic resources – a new political assembly of nonhuman life.

With this institutional identification they are in the same moment brought under the rule of the sovereign: they literally became part of the body of the state, its political life and thus its bios, a form of life that enjoys the state's protection. Genetic resources are now a political form of novel nonhuman life. It is here that this novel nonhuman life becomes a “secularized political concept” (Agamben 2000, p. 7) fitted to the institutional requirements of Finnish politics of nature, pertaining much more to the realms of politics than to the corporeality of genetic resources themselves attested to through the knowledge practices of biological sciences. This was the first move in defining the issue of genetic resources as a matter of nonhuman nativity. Thus began the process of nativization, or nativitas, as we call it.

As soon as the genetic resources gained a relatively stable temporal identity as beings of domesticated nature – a selection of plants, animals, or forests – their institutional interpretation was ready for use by the ministerial bodies working with their further governance. With this, the identity and institutional location of genetic resources gained relative fixity and became manageable as part of the national nature.

Thus, by locating the genetic resources under the sectoral mandate of MMF, the National Commission effected an administrative split between the so-called wild and domesticated natures, which can be seen from the explicit aims of the national programs. But, as we know from the studies in anthropology about the construction of novel cosmologies, “a theory of the world would need to start with dividing, not with grading” (Douglas 1986, p. 62). A crude definition of this novel nonhuman form of political life was now in place, and it relied on the political separation of powers enacted by the principle of sectoral responsibility.

Dislocating and destabilizing genetic resources

It is not predetermined whether an object will ever become naturalized, or how long it will remain so. (Bowker and Star 2002, p. 299)

Even if they were now stabilized as objects of governance, genetic resources nonetheless remained naturalized nonhuman forms of life only for the years between the release of the initial national biodiversity program and the drafting of the genetic resources programs – nine years, between 1996 and 2005. Soon after this, they started to unravel as clearly defined objects found in the national nature as they began to problematize both their institutional location and governance based on this. This problematization began when genetic resources and the experts acting as their representatives in the institutional structures refused to accept their identity as purely agricultural beings. Their inclusion in Finnish society purely through an economic relationship was questioned, and at the same time the once naturalized national articulation between nature and culture was ruptured.

The first disruptive event leading to the reinterpretation of genetic resources was the release of the so-called Bonn Guidelines. The release of these guidelines by the signatory nations to the CBD was a result of the six Conference of Parties events held in 2002 in The Hague, Netherlands (decision COP VI/24). The Bonn Guidelines were created as non-binding guiding principles for the interpretation and implementation of the CBD at a national level, especially regarding the issues of access to and sharing of the benefits of genetic resources. The second central event leading to the reinterpretation was the establishment of a new interim institutional body, which in the end did not fully fit the national political topography and its clearly identified distribution of powers over issues of nature.

This body was called the Working Group for Access and Benefit Sharing Issues (the ABS group), a group the National Board for Genetic Resources (NGBR) deemed necessary for dealing with the issues raised in the Bonn Guidelines. Proper implementation of the CBD according to the guidelines would require that the problematic ABS questions deemed mostly “political” – such as who in Finland can legitimately own and use genetic resources identified as native and how the related benefit sharing is to be officially arranged – be resolved alongside the scientific identification of the new genetic corporealities. In 2003, NBGR proposed that the ministry set up a working group to examine these issues. The proposal was accepted later the same year, and the ABS group was established under the national board for two years, between 2005 and 2006.

The mandate given to the working group by the ministry defines its aims, areas of action, and obligations. The mandate read:

Tasks:

– to deal with the aims of the Bonn Guidelines and related national implementation, including the development of legislation

– to clarify the roles and liabilities related to access and benefit sharing issues according to Article 15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity and liabilities stemming from other contracts (WTO/TRIPS, WIPO, UPOV, FAO/IT) as needed

– to prepare a proposal for a national strategy or action plan on the access and benefit sharing issues related to hereditary materials, and other provisions and tasks. (Mandate of the working group, D no. 580/041/2003)

Even if the Bonn Guidelines are not a “strongly binding”3 international document – the nation-states are not interpreted as legally bound to act on their provisions – by the wording of the mandate, the ministry has defined them as binding regarding the requirements of the working group. Here, the ministry performed an operation typical of politico-juridical institutions: it changed the nonbinding modality of the guidelines to legitimate the work of the working group and to foster the intertextual connection between national and international documents and institutions in charge of genetic resources. Thus, by changing the interpretation of the national weight of the document, the ministry obliged the group to examine the provisions of the CBD through the Bonn Guidelines and to relate the outcome of its work (a proposal, strategy, or national action plan) directly to biodiversity actions in Finland. In practice, then, with the wording of the mandate, the Bonn Guidelines became a nationally binding document.

Even if national sovereignty in the definition of genetic resources is stressed within the CBD, the national interpretations and actions based on these now had to fit both the guidelines and other international agreements. In other words, the tasks of the working group were now to include a review of national legislation but also consideration of the different ways in which the national implementation could be harmonized with the Bonn Guidelines and the whole network of international agreements to which they refer. In addition to the role of the ministerial institutions as interfaces articulating the appropriate relationship between national nature and culture, another mediating role became explicit: the working group should articulate the national institutions and legislation for supranational institutions and the network of international agreements they supervised.

The ministerial working group started its work on reexamining the definition of genetic resources in October 2004. After a short period of observation in the group, it became clear that the initial National Action Plan's positioning of genetic resources within the sphere of agriculture and forestry had the inverse consequence of bifurcating Finnish nature – locating genetic resources under MAF's political powers rejected the sphere of nature administered by the Ministry of the Environment (MEnv) from among their possible definitions.

According to the boundary infrastructure enacted by the principle of sectoral responsibility, these resources could not be defined as nonhuman life forms found in their “natural state” in the environment, or beings of a “wild” and undomesticated nature. This division into two administrative natures effected by the division of tasks and responsibilities between the two institutions was also clear to the members of the working group on ABS issues from the very beginning. It served as the starting point for the work. In an interview conducted while the group was active in its work, its secretary commented about this division of labor as follows:

The Ministry of the Environment is the ministry politically in charge of the issues concerning the CBD, and, for example, it organizes the national consultations in Finland that are to be represented at the EU-level meetings and consults all ministries affected by the issues somehow. And then when we have this National Board for Genetic Resources and its ABS group, they are located under the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry. This is why we are not specifically concerned about wild plants and life forms. Rather, we concentrate on cultivated plants and domesticated animals. (Secretary of the ABS group, 16 June 2005)

But the further the review work advanced, the clearer it was becoming that the institutional location of genetic resources in Finland was problematic from the standpoint of full implementation of the Bonn Guidelines. The guidelines required national strategies to cover all genetic resources (excluding human genetics, as stated in Article C9 of the Bonn Guidelines), not just those belonging to agriculture. While the NBGR's administrative sphere was limited to agricultural species according to its “vertical” responsibility (see Figure 1 and the definition of its administrative powers above), according to the Bonn Guidelines the mandate given to the ABS group would transgress any clear political bifurcation of nature according to national political topography. A contradiction ensued: if the ABS group would implement the requirements of the Bonn Guidelines nationally, its operational mandate would be greater than that given to the body (the ABGR) supervising its work. The secretary considered this possible contradiction, continuing her commentary about the national separation of administrative powers over spheres of nature as follows:

[T]his ABS subgroup is situated on the borderlines [of sectoral responsibilities]. It includes both the cultivars and domesticated animals, but also these wild … well, we will be considering all these issues in the national strategy. Or there are usually four categories; they are cultivars, domesticated animals, forests, and then wild plants and species. Of these, three are in the MAF mandate, and the wild ones belong to the MEnv. (ibid.)

Figure 1. The institutional topography in the implementation of the CBD. Notes.

The group's mandate thus expanded horizontally beyond the ministry's sectoral responsibilities to the spheres of nature considered the administrative realm of MEnv as it had to take into account the definition of genetic resources found in the Bonn Guidelines. These required that also “wild” resources as found in “nature” be considered in the ABS strategy. With this interpretation of the mandate given to the group, it found itself in a liminal space of politics between two ministries – the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the Ministry of the Environment – while accountable only to the Advisory Board on Genetic Resources, operating under the political powers of the former. In practice, it gained a new “diagonal” mandate that required an unofficial trust relationship between the ministries. For the Ministry of the Environment to take into account the findings of a strategy produced outside its political boundaries and by another ministry, the principle of sectoral responsibility had to be crossed via unofficial routes – by trusted experts and civil servants and their personal relations with the officials working within MEnv. Such a “diagonal” mandate is not unheard of in institutionalized decision-making, but it makes possible a new way of politics, one that operates within an institutional void for a limited time (see Hajer and Wagenaar 2003, p. 9).

The final ABS report drafted by the working group, released on 1 September 2006, extended the definition of genetic resources by including life forms in their “natural state.” Under the heading Wild Life Forms, it acknowledges the following:

Organisms in their natural state form a large heterogeneous group, including wild plants, excluding the family of wild plants related to cultivated species listed in Annex 1 of the IT treaty, wild animals, most of the sea creatures, and micro-organisms. Most of the life forms of this group are unknown and their economic value is hard to evaluate, as their mapping is not exercised in Finland in a systematic manner. This group of life forms belongs under the CBD, and the Bonn Guidelines are targeted especially to help create governance of this group. (MAF 2007, p. 24)

With this piece of text, the first national identification of genetic resources as purely agricultural forms of nonhuman life was dismantled. According to the report, Finnish genetic resources cut through the national political topography and related institutionalized spheres of administration. As subjects of governance, then, they questioned the bifurcation of nature through the institutional politics over nature to distinct spheres of “agricultural nature” and “nature as in its natural state,” or distinguishing between “domesticated” and “wild” nature. However, even if genetic resources gained a new textual representation through this document, their political or corporeal representation within the national politics of nature did not change. Another contradictory situation resulted: Finnish genetic resources were now redefined to refer to all native forms of life, wild or not, but at the same time official ways of making them into objects of national politics were absent. Accordingly, it also lacked the powers to address the other question raised by the ABS report – the mapping of the “known unknown” (Eriksson and Webster 2008) wild national bodies. The corporeal identification programs were initially delegated to the two research institutes, MTT and METLA, operating directly under the ministry. Their genetic resources programs, however, as we saw above, could only target agricultural native species, according to the principle of sectoral responsibility with the vertical boundary it put in place between different life forms under the institutionalized politics that legitimated and funded the research.

The chairwoman of NBGR commented on this institutionally enacted problem of corporeal identification during the same spring. She addressed the problem by way of an example from plant genetics programs:

I can't say that this is systematized work anyway. Well, we have well systematized our gene bank for cultivated plants … it is in-built in breeding work that the materials that are not used anymore will be sent to the gene bank, which conserves them. And then we have in some kind of order the horticultural plants, apples, cherries, pears, currants, rhubarb, shallots, and a very small number of other plants that are in the system. All the others are in a gray area. (NBGR chairwoman, 7 March 2006)

The known genetic resources were in her interview identified as familiar and concretely named corporeal forms of life. The gray area, however, contains all of the “known unknowns” – life forms that are known to exist but whose inscription in the scientific instruments as corporeal objects of nature and textual materialization as lists of varieties or breeds is missing. In the comment, they refer mostly to the “potentials” of wild, uncultivated varieties. As her comment illustrates, the civil servants (of whom most are themselves former biologists) in the ministry are amid the known that they do not know. The corporeal identification programs are only taking their first steps and are considerably hampered by the problematic national division of labor between the ministries in charge of the governance of the new genetic objects of nature.

The interim ABS working group and its liminal institutional location within the larger political topology had made possible the definition of genetic resources in a way that transgressed both the principle of sectoral responsibility and its enactment through the institutional infrastructure in charge of governing Finnish nature. Full implementation of the suggestions presented in the ABS group's “background memo” would require institutional duplication of genetic resources – placing them under both the MAF and MEnv mandates – to let the “wild” genetics enter the national politics of nature with explicitly legitimated institutional representations and corporeal identification programs.

Here, the principle of sectoral responsibility of the Council of State, however, which was initially suggested for creating a clear boundary infrastructure guiding the division of political labor and for “keeping things moving along,” now stopped the political movement required to resolve the issue. Neither the ABS group nor the ABGR as overseeing body could articulate the textual, political, and corporeal representation of national genetic resources in a coherent enough way. There now existed two, different political definitions of Finnish genetic resources: one allowing for legitimate national institutional representation through the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and the second presented in the ABS group's background memo, which was coherent and enabled the articulation of national genetic resources with the complex network of international agreements and institutions. The contradiction makes visible the interesting agency of genetic resources as subjects of governance – they became recalcitrant and highly unstable beings of nature.

How many natures in a nation?

Institutional positioning, political definition, and corporeal identification were not the only issues problematized with the ABS group's report. The other task given in its mandate was to suggest legislative changes if necessary to bring the genetic resources under the sovereign rule of the Finnish nation. In the two years, the group broadly reviewed national and international legislation concerning natural objects and property and came to the conclusion that bringing these new objects under national jurisdiction was challenging, if not directly problematic. Their rightful governance with the existing legislation in force was not possible, and to exercise their national sovereignty a number of challenges had to be addressed.

According to the CBD, every signatory nation gained sovereignty over native genetic resources and thus gained sovereign power to decide on their governance within the context of national legislation. However, since genetic resources are novel objects of nature, questions about legitimate ownership claims and fair use of the resources were not directly addressed in the national laws in force. Therefore, the group had to come up with suggestions for how national legislation concerning genetic resources could be developed by taking into account existing (national and international) regulations. Reflecting on the process of the work done, the chairman of the ABS group described how it proceeded with its work in an interview only a few months before the group's work was finished and the official background document on ABS issues was released:

[O]ur mandate was, of course, relatively clear – to deal with the Bonn Guidelines and to foster cooperation with other Nordic countries with regard to genetic resources and also to the review of the limits of our current system. We also had to look at the administrative and juridical issues and how they work with our national structures. […] [I] built the process in such a way that we looked at all international agreements from the point of view of genetic resources. To work this way also meant that in addition to the international agreements we have had to go through all the national agreements, laws, and statutes at the same time. We have looked through all the national legislation concerning the spheres of both the agricultural and the environmental ministry. This means that we have examined, for example, in detail the environmental regulations as well as the game and forestry governance in place, from the point of view of genetic resources and we have tried to identify possible holes or overlaps in governance or the elements in which these holes exist. (Chairman of the ABS group, 7 March 2006)

The first National Action Plan, released in 1998, had already taken a stance toward the question of ownership claims and relations by stating that the genetic resources do not necessitate legislative development. It said:

Discussion on the future implementation of the Convention has frequently addressed the question of ownership of genetic resources, but legally speaking, this does not present a real problem. Although the Convention contains certain obligations concerning the distribution of benefit from genetic resources, these obligations only have legal effect between the Contracting Parties, in compliance with the international law. None of the stipulations of the Convention requires changes to national property laws. (Kangas et al. 1997/8, p. 85)

In going through the network of related international agreements and comparing them to the national legislation in force, the working group came to the opposite conclusion. Because genetic resources are not inscribed in the national legislation as objects of ownership – none of the areas of the Finnish legislation in force identifies them as a possible form of natural property – they cannot legally be claimed to be objects of governance by private individuals or by the institutions of the state. Two interrelated findings made this problem very acute.

First, Section 15 of the Constitution of Finland4 guarantees very powerful legal protection of ownership to the citizens with regard to objects that are traditionally called “natural” – nonhuman life in biological beings such as cows or trees. In addition, the Finnish legal system acknowledges some basic rights such as “everyman's right” to collect certain natural objects for personal use (the collection of berries and mushrooms from all forests, privately owned or not, etc.). A logical consequence of this acknowledgement is that if genetic resources are legally defined as “traditional nature” comprising biologically identifiable nonhuman species, the sovereignty of the state would be undermined, for its arms of governance would lose much of their administrative powers – thus operationalized “sovereignty” – to the private citizens in possession of native biological matter. The definition of genetic resources within this interpretative frame was therefore impossible if the claim to sovereignty over them, found in both the CBD and the Bonn Guidelines, were to be enshrined in Finland. Inversely, if there is no national legislation that would recognize genetic resources as juridical objects, then there is no possibility for either the state or the private citizens to pose any legitimate ownership claims over them.

Or, as the senior adviser from the Ministry of Justice working in the group described the situation:

[T]he problem is that if we are talking about genetic material, even if it is connected to certain biological material that itself can be subjected to ownership, and this biological material – for example, animals or plants or a collection of bacteria – can be exchanged, then from the viewpoint of the current legal system in force it is unclear, or it is somewhat unclear, that it is possible for private persons to exchange the genetic material that is included in these biological materials. At the moment, we cannot really use traditional property laws fruitfully to solve this problem. (Expert member of the ABS group, 15 March 2006)

The problematic corporeal form of genetic resources as a potential object of ownership and governance already found always “included” inside biological matter caused the second problem for the working group. Its mandate, however, obliged it not only to find these problems of current legislation, or “holes” of governance, as the chairman put it, but also to consider possible ways in which these problems can be addressed. One possible solution was suggested early in 2006. In all of its simplicity, it involved a juridical bifurcation of nature to “biological” and “genetic” natures. Biological nature would consist of known “biological” beings such as trees, dogs, and bees, whereas genetic nature would consist only of the hereditary material making biological beings possible – genetic resources. The secretary of the ABS group clarified this possible solution in an interview some months before the release of the final document:

You could put it this way: if a tree grows in the forest and I'm the forest-owner, then I can make use of the biological matter by cutting down the tree and selling it to a paper factory and make money out of it. Or then I can be an everyman and pick a pine cone from that tree and use the biological matter – for example, burning it in a campfire. Or then you can collect some mushrooms growing in the forest and extract a valuable gene from them and do whatever you like with that – for example, use it in breeding work. And the problematics related to the issue are now culminating in the question of whether we should separate these two. If a private citizen owns the tree, then that person would not own the genetic resources embodied in the pine cone; those would be owned by the nation. At the moment, anybody can come and take the cone and make money out of it in any imaginable way. But the open question now is: Are we going to interpret the owner of the biological matter also as the owner of the genetic matter? Or should we separate these two ownerships? This is the big issue we are considering at the moment. (Secretary of the ABS group, interview on 16 June 2005)

Even if this juridical separation between different natures was considered as one of the possible solutions to the problem of ownership, the working group suspected that this kind of suggestion would create political problems. It would be hard to justify a rearrangement of ownership relations between the citizens and the state, especially to land- and forest-owners. But even harder would be the inscription of this ownership relation of genetic resources to the national legislation, since this would require a change, an amendment, at the level of the written Constitution. Chapter 15 of the Constitution guarantees such powerful protection of private ownership that even exercise of sovereignty by locating the authority to decide upon the ownership issues related to genetic resources with the Finnish state would require a rewrite of or an amendment to this chapter.

Despite the politico-juridical problems the solution would be likely to create, the working group ended up hinting at it in its final report. Resolution of the currently problematic jurisdictional system by creating two separate natures, one biological and the other genetic, is inscribed in the report with a politically sophisticated wording, one whose message is not manifestly apparent:

If the system is to be extended both to the organisms in the state of nature and to the public and private collections including live organisms, the realization of the system would probably require legislative action concerning at least the content of the contracts, the involvement of relevant stakeholders, a mechanism of prior informed consent, and administrative redress. In this case, the questions relating to the Constitution must be taken into account, as must, for example, the regulations concerning everyman's right. (MAF 2007, p. 17)

The working group's “background memo” reinterprets the first National Biodiversity Action Plan's interpretation of genetic resources as non-problematic objects of national governance and objects of legal ownership relations. In addition, it suggests a radical action in order to bring native nonhuman genetics under national governance and legally naturalize them as parts of Finnish nature. The question about the number of “natures” in Finland – a question prompted by these novel objects of genetic governance – is still, as we write this paper in early 2010, unresolved. However, even if this has remained an open question, since its initial release the report has had an impact on the politics of genetic resources.

After its release, this background document traveled higher up in the institutional circuits and quickly became part of the official future action program on biodiversity issues. In its new Decision-in-Principle, the Council of State decided on 21 December 2006, for a new, 10-year biodiversity program called “Saving Nature for People” for the years 2006–2016. The memo drafted by the ABS group has been connected to this by the questions raised on the status of genetic resources as political objects. It states that genetic resources, the actions related to them, and the ministries responsible for their representation in the politics of nature are going to be worked on with a slightly different national configuration:

Measures:

58) On the basis of the background report prepared by the subcommittee of the Genetic Resources Committee, the next steps for implementing the Bonn Guidelines in Finland will be examined, including the need for action on essential legislative issues and the development of administrative practices in accordance with Article 15 of the CBD, having regard where necessary also to obligations arising from other international agreements. The Genetic Resources Committee, which deals with issues related to genetic resources in agriculture under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, will examine Finland's national obligations related to the implementation of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and the Bonn Guidelines with regard to agricultural genetic resources. (Heikkinen et al. 2007, p. 105)

According to the new national program, the issue of genetic resources and their political representation has been re-delegated between two arms of administration. For the next 10 years, both the Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry are in charge of the political and juridical issues related to them. Again a new biosocial (Rabinow 1992) formation between the ministries has taken place around the issue of politics addressing the national question of genetic resources. However, the genetic resources remain a novel multitude of national genetics, a problematic collection of nonhuman life and matters of muddled biopolitics of the state. Their corporeal identification remains unsystematic, since no new programs of genetic identification are mentioned in the new national action plan and strategy. Further, the problematic juridical issues (and the ABS group's suggestion on the bifurcation of nature) are not addressed in the plan. In early 2010, national genetic resources in Finland, as corporeal objects of native genetics, as political objects of institutional representation, and as legal objects of governance, remain a complex form of national life.

Conclusion

Genetic resources are problematic beings belonging to conceptual, institutional, corporeal, and legal provenances – all of which require specific means and processes of boundary-making, institutional translations, and legal inscriptions. To sum up, for Finnish sovereignty to manifest itself in and through nonhuman genetic resources, sole administrative exercises are not enough. For fully investing national sovereignty in the nonhuman genetic material, a change of the Constitution is an essential requirement, and, with it, a novel legal ontology of Finnish nature is suggested. The crafting of a novel cosmology, which started with the easy institutional division between domesticated and wild natures, has at this point ended up with a proliferation of divisions – genetic resources are becoming a complex network of conceptual, institutional, and legal divisions of natural-social entities calling for the re-inscription of the outer limits of the Finnish nation-state itself.

Genetic governance, as, for example, Faulkner et al. (2003) and Brown and Michael (2004) have described in the context of risk debates, might be difficult to achieve, because the novel natures, such as genetic resources, traverse current institutional arrangements and challenge their capabilities as regulatory tools for these natures. Even if institutional arrangements are key elements in the national identification and stabilization of the identity of genetic resources, they are not the only actors in this identity process in any determinate or unilateral way.

Instead, alongside other negotiations, the institutions and their policies must negotiate with the agential influence of genetic resources themselves in the process of carving up this novel biowealth. To quote Brown and Michael, we are arguing that “national genetic resources, like all ‘innovated natures’ are reciprocally enabled by regulatory structures that facilitate particular sorts of research regimes concerning nature, and by the agency that this innovated nature gains by its resistance of the attempts to bring it under governance” (2004, p. 213).

There is thus a deeply running implication to sovereignty at play with regard to genetic resources. In the process of nativitas we see the breach of the very outer limits and the renaturalization of the body of a sovereign state: at the very moment when genetic resources are to be included in the body of the state, the state constitutes itself anew by forcing ministerial bodies into a state of exception in order to be able to include novel forms of life in both its institutional and constitutional ordering of nature. If the sovereign is truly the one that decides on the state of exception (Schmitt 1985), we see in this paper how novel biotechnological entities such as genetic resources are able to exert subversive forces sufficiently to bring the sovereignty of a state into the light through the events described in this paper (Agamben 2000, p. 18:9, p. 20:1, p. 6:7, p. 23:4).

At present, the issues of the identity of genetic resources and their ownership are unresolved as the ABS report is being circulated for its consultation around the pathways of Finnish governance. This case, however, shows how the boundaries of both nature and society are called into question by this novel nature of genetic biowealth. It also shows that the recalculation of the objects in Finnish society and nature and their renaturalization (constitution) are at stake in this process. In other words, the policy-making process with respect to the ABS issues of genetic biowealth is co-producing or opening up possibilities for renegotiations of both the natural order (how many natures?) and the social order (who owns them, and what location or identity do they have as national objects of governance?). Different possible answers will literally yield different constitutions and thus configurations of Finnish nature–cultures. The resulting configuration is dependent on the political relevance and weight of the issue, articulated as a question of which kinds of alterations to the current configuration are politically viable in the attempt to control novel nonhuman forms of life and their populations.

Today, the questions of definition, ownership, and the future of Finnish genetic resources remain unresolved and subject to ongoing political wrangling. As one expert on the ABS subcommittee put it in an interview, “It is now, of course, a matter of politics what kind of stance is taken on these issues.” If it is then a matter of national biopolitics – of politics taking life as its object – what kind of national politics of life is this?

Writing about the anthropological machine in philosophy and the human sciences, Agamben (2004, p. 37) states, following Foucault's similar argument found previously in his 1966 archaeology of human sciences, Les mots et les choses, that:

[i]nsofar as the production of man through the opposition man/animal, human/inhuman, is at stake here, the machine necessarily functions by means of an exclusion (which is also always already a capturing) and an inclusion (which is also always already an exclusion).

It is this very same anthropological machine that has long effected an exclusion of nonhumans in the study of the formation and constant renegotiation of modern nationhoods. Instead of being treated as the fleshy corporeal matter of nationhood, they have been treated as imagined projections of communal identity. In discussions of nation-formation, rarely have nonhumans been regarded as anything more than symbolic figures or representations or metaphors of a national identity (e.g. Ritvo 1992, Michael 2001).

The natura sacer–sovereign relationship properly describes the current direction of juridico-institutional biopower over bare life. Nevertheless, nonhumans, despite the attempt to bring them under the rule of biopower, are more recalcitrant, and thus not necessarily at odds with the Foucauldian way of understanding the control of populations. In novel technoscientific practices, the very distinction between humans and nonhumans, already crossed both symbolically and materially in, for example, xenotransplantation and tissue engineering (Brown and Michael 2004), has been challenged, and the usefulness of the human/nonhuman dichotomies in the formation and/or description of current hybrid identities is urgently called into question. In other words, the anthropological machine that lies at the very heart of our philosophical understanding of “human” and hence “bios” is becoming a problematic machine for producing useful identities in our current situation.

It is no wonder then that also our understanding of the constitution of the collectives in which we live today, of which nation-states are arguably the most powerful, is called into question (Latour 1993). In studies of nationhood and biopower, the nonhuman is routinely “othered,” the forgotten corporealities of an anthropocentric theoretical imagination.

However, and in contrast, this paper has argued that the paradoxical relations of nonhumans to the sovereign, at once captured and excluded, are constitutive to the governance in any modern state. Nonhuman genetic resources provide a potential source of novel biowealth, but they also act as living genetic corporealities through which sovereign biopower is enacted. Nonhumans are indeed constitutive parts of any sovereign state, bodies through which nationhood is at once naturalized and vitalized.

Offering a startling diagnosis of today's problematic relationship between the human and the nonhuman Agamben writes,

When the difference vanishes and the two terms collapse upon each other – as seems to be happening today – the difference between being and nothing, licit and illicit, divine and demonic also fades away, and in its place something appears for which we seem to lack even a name. (2004, p. 22)

This is a complex interaction between the global political economy of genetic resources (see e.g. Parry 2004) and national interests, with the latter seeking proprietary ownership of biowealth while at the same time redefining collective identity. This collapsing of the categories of the human and the nonhuman, and its role in the biopolitics of state-formation we have chosen to express through the term “nativitas”: governmental forces by which nation-states are predicating and enacting their sovereignty by their claims of origins in and through nonhuman genetic resources.

In analyzing these processes we have made two arguments. First, current debates on biopower concentrate heavily on how the human population is made governable at a political, legal and scientific level. However, we argue that it is equally important to look at how nonhuman forms of life are made objects of national governance in order to fully understand what kind of biopolitical formation a “nation” is, how it is performed through interactions within the institutions of political power and questioning what is at stake in these complex processes. Here, the case of Finland is emblematic in demonstrating how the definition and governance of novel nonhuman populations are important to all signatory nations of the CBD. Second, the analysis of the national processes described in this paper provides an opportunity for future comparative work on nativitization: how different countries interpret international conventions and what institutions are mobilized in the process, how they understand the relation of natural entities to their legal structures, political possibilities and cultural heritage in the making of national genetic resources. Finally, this comparative work would possibly reveal interesting differences in various nations' political and civic cultures concerning nonhuman populations, how governance is enacted upon them and, finally, how nations' natures are assembled differently depending on the complex interplay of powers manifesting sovereignty.

Notes

Note: Genetic resources were delegated to the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry and other biodiversity actions to the Ministry of the Environment, which set up its own expert bodies, focusing on other issues.

The etymology offered by the OED traces nativity to twin acts of being born and the birthing of the nation, as seen in William Paley's 1785 work The principles of moral & political philosophy (1818) II, 133: “The circumstance of nativity, that is of claiming and treating as subjects all those who are born within the confines of their dominions.”

Article 15, 3: “For the purpose of this Convention, the genetic resources being provided by a Contracting Party, as referred to in this Article and Articles 16 and 19, are only those that are provided by Contracting Parties that are countries of origin of such resources or by the Parties that have acquired the genetic resources in accordance with this Convention.” See also COP decision VI/24B: “The Conference of Parties (COP) 1. Decides to establish a group of technical experts to explore and elaborate possible options, without prejudging their desirability, for the form, intent and functioning of an internationally recognised certificate of origin/source/legal provenance and analyse its practicality, feasibility, costs and benefits, with a view to achieving the objectives of Articles 15 and 8(j) of the Convention.”

As stated in Bonn Guidelines provisions IA3, IA4, and especially IA7a, “[t]he present Guidelines are voluntary and were prepared with a view to ensuring their: (a) Voluntary nature: they are intended to guide both users and providers of genetic resources on a voluntary basis” (Bonn Guidelines 2003).

Finnish Constitution, Section 15, on protection of property: “The property of everyone is protected. \Provisions on the expropriation of property, for public needs and against full compensation, are laid down by an Act.”