Contradictions, frames and reproductions: The emergence of the WIPO Development Agenda

ABSTRACT

This article takes as its starting point the emergence of the so-called Development Agenda at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 2004. It seeks to provide a diachronic view of the origins of the Agenda that goes beyond understanding it simply as an effort by some developing countries and civil society actors to bring about organisational change at WIPO. Building upon insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that the Development Agenda is the manifestation of a founding contradiction in the institution of intellectual property itself, which has been the source of a great number of conflicts throughout its history. Actors involved in them have often used frames in an effort to legitimise their actions, such as the frame of development in the case of the Agenda. After exploring the development frame, the article concludes by arguing that the Agenda is likely to bring about only incremental changes, rather than transcend the tensions that helped bring it about.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual property
• WIPO
• development
• framing
• sociological institutionalism
• institutional contradictions

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Tony Payne, Ole Jacob Sending, David Owen, Ahmed Abel Latif, Lena Rethel, Chris Holmes, Pia Riggirozzi and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

Notes

1. Members of Development Group included: Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Iran, Kenya, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania and Venezuela Egypt, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Philippines, Senegal, Oman, Ethiopia, Benin, Peru, Colombia, El-Salvador, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and others. China and India also supported the proposal.

2. For a history of TRIPS negotiations and reasons for its conclusion at the GATT/WTO, see Sell (2003) and Drahos and Braithwaite (2002).

3. Rule-making in WIPO can be in the form of treaty of soft law norms. It takes place mainly in three bodies: the Standing Committee on the Law of Patents, the Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indicators and the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights.