INTRODUCTION

The previous chapters have dealt with a number of problems in the current relationship between intellectual property regimes and development, highlighting the way such regimes limit access to new technologies, books, and medicines in Pacific island countries. We have suggested that although the recent expansion of global intellectual property regimes into small Pacific island states has been justified, and to an extent operationalised, on the basis that it will promote their development, global intellectual property regimes will almost certainly have an overall negative effect in the region, given the current and future import/ export ratio of intellectual property protected goods in these countries. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it provides a brief overview of current critiques of intellectual property and development, focusing in particular upon the suggestions for change. It argues that these suggestions, taken as a whole, have failed to bring about much real change in the overall trend of more intellectual property institutions, more countries being incorporated into the global system and higher intellectual property standards. Whilst not discounting the very powerful political and economic forces at play here, we suggest in the second part of the chapter that an explanation for this is that the majority of the critiques are framed within the same general approach to development as the intellectual property and development narrative itself. Further, they have been articulated in forums dominated by the actors driving the agenda, such as WIPO and the WTO and other international treaty making bodies. As a result, potentially challenging views have been appropriated and absorbed within the mainstream intellectual property paradigm, without occasioning any substantive reform.

In this chapter we therefore adopt a different approach to critiquing the intellectual property and development project, drawing on lessons from the more radical critiques that have been made of development as a whole over the past decade. We canvass a wide range of different disciplines, including post-development, post-colonial, decolonial, critical development, anthropology, socio-legal theory, and human geography, which in general adopt deconstructive, post-structuralist approaches to questions of development. This chapter explores insights from these different critiques of development and uses them to cast new light on questions of intellectual property and development, and particularly to open up alternative pathways forward.