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This book opens a window into how two ambitious countries - India and Brazil - are seeking to become knowledge powers in the 21st century. As the knowledge economy became the preferred way of conceptualising the economy and its future direction, in the more economically-advanced countries, our search for understanding also followed the same direction. This generated a body of work that has neglected countries that, like India and Brazil, are attempting to make the leap into knowledge economies. Muzaka explores these motivations and the ways in which they have inspired a number of institutional reforms in India and Brazil. The author offers an investigation of the role the state in shaping the respective intellectual property systems pertaining to the pharmaceutical and agro-biotechnology sectors and the multiple social conflicts that have unfolded as a result.

This book shows why contests over intellectual property rights and access to affordable medicines emerged in the 1990s and how they have been 'resolved' so far. It argues that the current arrangement mainly ensures wealth for some rather than health for all, and points to broader concerns related to governing intellectual property solely as capital.

AbstractThe aim of this article is twofold: first, it seeks to address the question of why the competitive knowledge economy orientation that emerged in certain economically advanced states as a response to the crisis of Fordism came to be embraced by the Indian and the Brazilian states from the late 1980s onwards. Second, it aims to elucidate the manner in which the goal of becoming competitive knowledge economies has been articulated and implemented locally, especially from the mid-1990s onwards, by key fragments of the Indian and the Brazilian states. Drawing on insights from the competition state, regulation school, knowledge economy literature and that on India and Brazil, attention is paid to the context- and conjuncture-specific domestic and international factors that have contributed not only to the adoption of the competitive knowledge economy orientation, but also to the necessarily distinctive ways in which it found expression in practice in India and Brazil.

A number of developing countries that are often referred to as emerging economies have turned their attention to addressing their public health issues in more comprehensive and systematic ways. One of the most notable recent additions to the ranks of these countries is India, where consultations about building a universal health care system have been going on since 2015. While the trajectory of this particular initiative and similar ones elsewhere is yet to be determined, the aim of this piece is to draw some lessons from an emerging economy that, for contingent historical and political reasons, started building a universal public health care system earlier: Brazil. The key argument offered from the Brazilian experience is that building a robust public health care system based on the principles of universality and equity is a challenge of a political economy nature and one that ought to be met at multiple levels simultaneously.

Despite the fact that early work on international regimes conceptualised them as dialogic in nature, this fundamental regime property has remained relatively underdeveloped. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin and his circle, this article proposes a dialogic framework to understanding regimes and the political struggles that constitute them. Focusing on the contextual and relational properties of signification processes within a regime, one of the key arguments is that neither their dialogic nature, nor the trajectory and outcome of a particular conflict can be understood without giving full attention to language as a power-laden form of action, as praxis. By focusing on how language and discourse are implicated and put to work in a particular instance of regime contestation, namely the Development Agenda proposed by a group of developing countries' representatives at the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2004, efforts are made not only to bring to the fore the political and ideological nature of the 'shared understandings' without which a regime would not exist, but also the manner in which they are reproduced and reinvigorated, even by those acts of resistance that set out to challenge them.