Learning to Love Patents: Capacity building, intellectual property and the (re)production of governance norms in the ‘developing world’
by Christopher May (Reader in International Political Economy School of Politics, Faculty of Humanities, Languages and Social Science University of the West of England)
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There is little settled or uncontested about the current settlement as regards the construction of regimes of property rights that establish the ownership of knowledge and information along the lines laid out in the TRIPs agreement. This suggests that the provision of training and technical assistance to build capacity is itself part of the reproduction of the dominant (TRIPs constituted) view of intellectual property and is therefore a political project rather than merely technical provision. On one side many developing countries’ elites and governments are keen to join the international trading community and see the need to adopt the increasingly universalised rules of the system as part of this process. On the other hand, in many developing countries there are vocal constituencies less supportive of an unqualified adoption of TRIPs related standards of legal protection for IPRs. Given the continuing importance of legal structures to underpin and constitute markets (and this is most especially the case in markets for knowledge and information), the processes by which the TRIPs solution to the question of knowledge ownership is being globalised through technical training needs to be understood and brought under analysis. In this paper I lay out the importance of the reproduction of legal structures in this issue area, the character and size of the programmes in developing countries, some of the political issues that surround this activity, and conclude by suggesting that this process can be seen as one aspect of Stephen Gill’s more generalised conception of the ‘new constitutionalism’.
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