Public Interest Representation in Global IP Policy Institutions

This paper compares the institutional and procedural arrangements that a range of global institutions make for civil society representation and input into policy development processes on intellectual property issues. The context for this analysis comes from two sets of norms for multi-stakeholder public policy development that exist in other regimes of governance: those of the Aarhus Convention (for environmental matters), and those of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society (for Internet governance). These global norms, along with the actual practices of the institutions involved in global governance of intellectual property rights, are then contrasted with the proposed new institutional mechanisms for ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. It is found that ACTA falls short even of the practices of the other institutions analysed, but far shorter of the ideals promulgated in the Aarhus Convention and the Tunis Agenda. Whilst the shortcomings of the ACTA negotiation process are largely to blame for this, an underlying problem is the lack of a normative framework for civil society representation and participation in intellectual property policy development