In this book, the authors trace the contours of knowledge and innovation in Africa from the founding civilisations to today’s current realities, and then set out the drivers of change that can be expected to shape innovation systems on the continent between now and the year 2035. The volume...

The past 25 years have seen a charged discourse about bio-piracy: the unequal access to benefits of genetic resources and local knowledge, and the intellectual property system's failure to adequately recognize Indigenous or non-western knowledge, while expanding property rights over life forms....

The search for appropriate modalities for the protection of indigenous or traditional knowledge is a subject of contemporary international law and policy discourse. As a primary mechanism for the allocation of rights over knowledge, Western or conventional intellectual property rights (IPRs)...

It is commonly accepted that as the primary mechanism for allocating rights over knowledge, western conventional intellectual property rights inadequately addresses the unique challenges of protecting traditional and indigenous knowledge. There is general consensus that a sui generis regime is...

Discourses of local knowledge and categories of rights claimants thereto are embroiled in complex conceptual and analytical morass. The conceptual quandary around local knowledge is diversionary from the historically rooted hierarchies of culture, power and politics that have subjugated it....

This report explores the extent to which indigenous knowledge have been advanced by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit up to Rio 20 in the evolution of coastal, ocean and marine environmental law. Parties to the Rio Earth Summit have failed to follow through on their commitments, but the state of the...

The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) has, for nearly two decades, engaged in formulating the nature and content of a text-based legal instrument or instruments for the effective protection of genetic resources (GRs), traditional knowledge (TK), and traditional cultural expressions...

The chapter has four parts. Following this introduction, the second part sets the legal, economic, technological, social and geopolitical context in which debates about IPRs and ICTs have unfolded. The third section describes select research activities addressing the connections among IPRs and...