The WTO has promoted Western-styled IP norms around the world. These IP-related endeavours can be seen as part of a global ‘neoliberal’ move in the direction of less state and more private entrepreneurship. Whereas some ‘orthodox’ development scholars have welcomed the turn towards market institutions in development policy, other ‘critical’ development scholars have argued that Western IP norms are ill-suited to the needs of developing countries, especially in the agricultural sector. Both orthodox and critical scholars have two blind spots. First, they have focused on emerging economies. The poorest African countries have been manifestly understudied. Secondly, there is a problematic lack of data on how the law works on a daily basis.
The PhD project aims to fill these geographical and empirical gaps. The project focuses on the implementation in Africa of ‘breeding business law’: patents on agro-biotech, plant variety protection and seed legislation. The working hypothesis is that breeding business law is not as much supporting multinational seed companies, but is rather locally adapted to the interests of domestic elites (politicians, landlords etc.). These interests, part of the local political economy, will typically revolve around clientelistic redistribution via patronage networks. Accordingly, breeding business law is to a large extent disused (not implemented) and to some extent dysfunctional (working towards other, clientelistic goals than the neoliberal ones for which it was designed).
The goal of the PhD is to gain insight into the relationships between intellectual property, political economy and development policy in Africa. These links have been under researched. Legal scholars often remain at the level of legal principle and legal texts. They do not approach IP law and other norms of economic law as living legal institutions that interact with political economy. Development scholars, for their part, hardly ever consider the law as an object of study. They do not normally treat the law as a separate domain endowed with its own logic. The objective of the research is thus to open a new, law-based empirical research line within the controversial debate about the intricacies between IPRs and economic development – in particular in relation to agriculture and food security.
In addition to a broad desktop study based on Africa-wide statistics and legal sources, the project entails fieldwork-based comparative case studies of breeding business law in Senegal and Burkina Faso. Senegal and Burkina Faso have similar levels of economic development as well as the very same legal framework and legal background, as both of them are former French colonies that are ECOWAS and OAPI Member States. Yet, they have different political economies and cash crop cultures (groundnut vs. cotton). Accordingly, the project maps the influences of these differences in political economy on the interpretation of breeding business law in both countries.
