Globalizing governance: The case of intellectual property rights in the Philippines

Abstract

This article aims to shed light on processes of neoliberal restructuring by tracing the ways that a WTO-compliant law allowing for intellectual property on plants in the Philippines was developed and passed. The law creates a new form of property right (for the Philippines) restricting the ability of farmers to save and exchange seed. The Philippine Plant Variety Protection Act, passed in 2002, nominally responds to the requirements of the WTO but contains proscriptions well beyond what is required under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. How and why did this situation come about? In investigating this case, my attention is on the ‘messy actualities’ (Larner, 2000) of change – not to divert attention from the significance of the power moves involved but to tease out how such changes are enacted in practice. Drawing on 30 interviews with politicians, policy makers, social movement participants and industry representatives in the Philippines, my account reveals a diverse array of techniques, practices and relationships at work. Rumors about the levels of compliance required under the WTO's TRIPS agreement, fear of being made an example of, desire to build respect by working on ‘important’ laws combine with other hybrid pressures and motivations, both intimate and distant, to form a powerful geography of change. What emerges is an embodied geography of neoliberal restructuring informed both by processes of broad political economic transformation and by the contextually important, active nature of Filipino social and political life.