The international management of biodiversity

The Earth Summit in Rio was expected to pave the way for more and effective cooperation with respect to biodiversity. This paper discusses the approaches which were adopted at the summit and the benefits of biodiversity which are closely related to innovations of the biotechnology industries. The paper shows that the projectrelated support is principally able both to guarantee a certain degree of preservation and to avoid administration problems which originate from information asymmetries and rent-seeking. The project-related control of environment-friendliness can serve as an effective, although insufficient second-best instrument unless a general pricing rule for different international environmental services is available. However, the paper also shows that the agreed-upon preferential access of developing countries to patented biotechnology products will encounter a lot of problems.