Traditional forms of knowledge about bioactive plants have challenged current legal and scientfic understandings of intellectual property (IP) by raising questions about the centrality of authorship, the definition of property, the obligations of ownership, and the territoriality of the patent system. Understanding how these forms of knowledge can productively intersect with global IP regimes is an important question for policymakers, social scientists, and those seeking to fairly distribute IP benefits to traditional groups. To address this issue, this study investigates how and why scientists and scientific institutions investigating traditional medicine in Africa are innovating new sustainable forms of intellectual property as the grace periods for the implementation of the major international property agreements near their end and developing countries are compelled to complete the transition to the new global property regime. The study investigates the formation and operation of new forms of collaboration that are emerging between healers, patients, scientists, scientific institutions and private companies in the name of modernizing traditional medicine; accounts for the relationship between property and health that inheres in visions of sustainable health; and describes the forms of commons that are being imagined in efforts to develop traditional medicine with the goal of contributing to sustainable health. To do so, the study uses ethnographic tools to examine the ways that two research centers in Tanzania are interpreting, applying and re-working global intellectual property policies during their research into traditional medicines.
Broader impacts include the creation of international research and publication networks, educational and capacity building initiatives, and transferrable knowledge about how traditional forms of knowledge can be fairly integrated into international property regimes. This project will also bring African ways of knowing and innovating into emerging legal debates on property, public domain, and the commons in an effort to catalyze new possibilities for the protection of plant life and communal knowledge derived from plant life.
