Conclusions: Race to the bottom versus slow walk to the top

Making local experience count While, for almost a decade at international and national fora, decision-makers, advisors and advocates have ardently debated the precise wording of ABS policies and laws, in communities around the world, farmers, indigenous peoples, researchers, NGO staff and local government agents have been working hard to implement, test and assess effective, fair and equitable mechanisms. Often, but not always, they established and tried to maintain direct links with the national and international fora to have, at least, a voice in the debates and negotiations and, in the best of cases, a choice as well. In this chapter we review the experiences and lessons learned from the case studies in light of the broader policy and legal processes, summarized in Part 1. We do this by re-examining the questions we set out to answer in Part 1 from a comparative perspective. This will highlight the relevance of the cases to both the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA).