Biodiversity loss raises some of the most difficult issues of equity in international environmental law. Differential obligations have been developed as a means of enabling developed and developing countries to participate in the Biodiversity Convention. This article contends that the actual practices of these obligations have been cast narrowly, reinforce the existing politics and economics of biodiversity conservation, and are difficult to see and practise. They have been predominantly understood as obliging the transfer of funds and technology between states and as implicitly encouraging technology-based development pathways. The article calls for differential obligations to be reworked in environmental justice terms to encompass plural, alternative development pathways, such as creating local economies. It proposes that emerging market-based, community initiatives and the ecological footprint concept could help to provide ways to make differential obligations more workable.