Abstract
This paper aims at developing an original account of trust in the framework of large scale, international collective action institutions. Our research question focuses on the desired structures and mechanisms that are necessary to sustain the trust needed to uphold the effective operation of institutions for collective action. Our theoretical framework for studying trust is based on the social capital theory. Social capital is defined as the features of social organization, such as trust, networks and norms that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit. We claim that in different sectors and contexts stakeholders encounter difficulties in collaborating in setting up experimental institutions for collective action. In order to generate more collaboration, stakeholders need to create structures that incite actors to find the optimal way to sustain trust, to organizationally acknowledge and learn that process, and to nourish it with the precise normative idea behind the institutional apparatus. In the areas of plant genetic resources and biomedicine, stakeholders have encountered these difficulties while experimenting with different coordination mechanisms for dealing with the increased appropriation of knowledge through patents. Our two case studies in plant genetic resources and biomedicine reflect the idea that institutions must be understood as complex pragmatic connectors of trust, i.e. social matrices of collective action that sustain individual commitment, where routine and reflexivity drive trust-based coordination mechanisms in interaction with their environment. From this theoretical framework we derive some recommendations that could be useful in deciding on how to implement this idea.
Highlights
Intellectual property (IP) rights – and in particular patents – tend to occupy a prominent position in many ongoing debates about so-called “grand challenges”, such as climate change, food security, protection of biodiversity, and global health
Whereas both the ITPGRFA and the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) rely on interesting and well-intentioned governance propositions to create and sustain, through the creation of social capital, a trustworthy cooperation between stakeholders, they may not have been sufficiently radical in terms of destabilization of mercantile behavior
The normative idea behind the creation of institutional structures may promote positive cooperation, but if its interpretation by stakeholders in context is not allowed, it is unlikely that it will generate a level of trust that is appropriate for the effective operation of the collective action models
Summary
Intellectual property (IP) rights – and in particular patents – tend to occupy a prominent position in many ongoing debates about so-called “grand challenges”, such as climate change, food security, protection of biodiversity, and global health. In the second stage of our analysis, some examples derived from prior studies on IP coordination mechanisms for plant genetic resources and biomedicine are used to contextualize and illustrate the theoretical framework (Section 1.2) These examples confirm the importance of trust in collective action institutions suggested by this paper and show the challenges of framing governance proposals that facilitate the generation of trust among stakeholders. They demonstrate that the conceptual shift towards commodification of plant genetic resources and the increase of patented biomedical inventions have resulted in similar challenges in dealing with fragmented resources. The paper is based on the assumption that the general commodification of knowledge and resources has led to “crowding-out” and “anti-commons” effects, and that a theoretical focus on trust within the social capital paradigm will provides us, with the conceptual means to better understand the challenges in sustaining institutional trust at stake in our illustrative examples, but will lead to some governance recommendations in terms of experimentalism
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