The essential challenges for the future development of a “trade-related” international law of IP are coherence (the inclusive and effective conduct of the “TRIPS and...” debates), and the challenge of legitimacy (or, how to give effect to the “should” of TRIPS Article 7). Ultimately, these two challenges converge: legal and policy coherence is integral to legitimacy, as the interplay between IP, trade, and non-trade legal instruments and policy objectives is shown to be irreducibly complex and impossible to segregate, and coherence is also integral to the practical effectiveness of an IP system operating within the policy space marked out by TRIPS (and thus seeking to “implement” the objectives of Article 7). Ultimately, these concerns are practical, and susceptible to empirical analysis. The two decades of TRIPS have yielded a richer, vastly more broad based and more practically tested set of national experiences and policy choices to learn from, offering the prospect of learning collectively from what has been done individually within the general framework of TRIPS: a process of transparency, policy exchange, and a positive feedback loop for domestic policymakers that could be considered in a sense the “collective management of TRIPS.” What are phrased as policy concerns are ultimately profoundly practical: actually delivering, in diverse cultural, economic and social settings, on the promise of innovation and access to technologies for health, protection of the environment, and participation in the knowledge economy, and enrichment of life through the development and dissemination of cultural works. These more fundamental goals have long been the ostensive policy aims of IP laws and policies. And international IP law shares with international trade law the characteristic that it is not, for the most part, pursued and justified as an end in itself but as a means to achieving public policy outcomes, and the “mutual advantage” of TRIPS Article 7. The core “trade-related” aspect of IP rights may indeed be the recognition that both policy tools can and should be yoked together harmoniously to yield the “social and economic benefits” that TRIPS articulates as the objectives of IP protection: in a still contested policy space, actual effectiveness in achieving these outcomes is ultimately the most sustainable and convincing form of legitimacy for the overall 'trade and IP' complex
