ABSTRACT This study examines the politics of knowledge benefit-sharing within the re-regulatory framework of the Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement which entered into force in 1995 under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The thesis argues that TRIPS both represents a mainstream legal mechanism for states and organisations to govern ideas through trade, and is characterised by a commercial direction away from multilateralism to bilateralism. In its post-implementation phase, this situation has seen the strongest states and corporations consolidate extensive markets in knowledge goods and services. Through analyses of the various levels of international and national governance within the competitive knowledge structure of international political economy (IPE), this study argues that the politicisation of intellectual property has resulted in the dislocation of reciprocity from its normative roots in fairness and trade equity. In conducting this enquiry the research focuses on the political manifestations of intellectual property consistent with long-standing epistemic considerations of reciprocity to test the extent to which the intrinsic public good value of knowledge and its importance to human societies can be reconciled with the privatisation of public forms of knowledge related to discoveries and innovations. This thesis draws on Becker's virtue-theoretic model of reciprocity premised on normative obligations to social life to ground its claim that an absence of substantive reciprocal requirements capable of sustaining equivalent returns and rewards is detrimental, both theoretically and practically, to the intrinsic socio-cultural foundation and public good value of knowledge. The conceptual framework of reciprocity defined and developed in this study challenges the materialist controlling authority and proprietary ownership vested in intellectual property law. A new conceptual approach proposed through reciprocity, and provoked by on-going debates about IP recognition, knowledge protection, access and distribution is advanced to counter strengthened and expanded IPRs. Theories of knowledge and property drawn from political philosophies are employed to test whether reciprocity is sufficiently robust enough, or even capable of, encompassing the gap between capital and applied science. This thesis argues that hyper-capitalism at global, national and local levels, accompanied by the boundless accumulation of technology, closes down competition both compromising IP as private rights and the viability of their governance. The political implications of the protection and enforcement of private rights through IP is examined in two key chapters utilising empirical data in relation to traditional knowledge (TK) and reciprocity; the first sets the parameters of TK and the second explores aspects of Māori knowledge systems and reciprocity directed at identifying national and local issues of significance to the debates on IP governance. As a viable direction for knowledge governance this thesis concludes that the gap between the re-regulatory trade framework of intellectual property on the one hand, and reciprocity on the other, requires closing to ameliorate the detrimental disruptions to democratic integrity, fairness and trade equity for significant numbers of communities and peoples around the world.

Contemporary global governance has become reliant on the expert knowledge of professional actors. Yet governance systems based on technical forms of private authority have proven highly unstable and vulnerable to crisis. How is private authority re-configured following challenges and pressures for change in times of crisis? This dissertation explores the agency exercised by a range of professional actors seeking to legitimately reassert power during periods in which their expert knowledge has become unsettled. A two-prong thesis is advanced. First, in drawing on explicitly normative discourses professional actors seek to reassert moral authority, rather than addressing flaws in their expert knowledge and emphasising their technical authority. Professional actors express attention to and involvement with a wider array of overtly ethical issues that had previously been abstracted away. Second, reassertions of authority may depend not merely on more explicit positioning within normative debates but upon the underlying ideas and values prioritised. The authority of professional actors remains precarious when value sets linked to crisis are continuously emphasised. A genealogical analysis of professional actors in Anglo-American finance since the outbreak of the most recent financial crisis in 2007 is undertaken through a revised variant of the discursive institutionalist framework. Informed by primary documents from professional actors and their associations along with original interviews and secondary media documents, the changing underpinnings of the authority of financial services providers, economists, and advisories based in the United States and United Kingdom are examined. The study contributes to a wider emphasis on the changing authority of a range of private actors as well as to an enhaced stress on both discourse and ethics in International Relations, Global/International Political Economy, and Global Governance scholarship. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation explores the persistent prominence of professional actors in Anglo-American finance since 2007. Though their legitimacy has become widely challenged with the outbreak of the most severe period of instability since the Great Depression, the power of these private actors has not entirely been dislodged. Professional actors have sought to legitimise such continued power in financial governance in novel manners since 2007. This study critically assesses attempts by professional actors to reconfigure their authority in the recent period of volatility. In interpreting how professional actors have sought to reconfigure authority, rather than explaining the ultimate success of their attempts to do so, efforts by professional actors to legitimise their power are scrutinised. Uncovering the precariousness of such attempts, this study casts further doubt on the legitimacy of both professionals as well as on-going efforts to reform financial governance that persistently rely on the authority of private actors.

This dissertation contends that to appropriately address important cross-border problems and pursue public interest(s) in an increasingly globalized world, we must deal directly with the more complex, networked, interdependent and hybrid governance forms which have grown increasingly common alongside globalization. Consequently this, dissertation examines the largely unexplored possibility of commercial contracts to act as a governance tool capable of improving the ethical quality and effectiveness of global agri-food governance to address critical challenges in that sector. These include those associated with food safety, ecological sustainability and biodiversity, gender equality, access to food, poor working conditions, inequality as well as issues of representation and inclusion in decision-making. To do so, the dissertation advances a novel conceptual framework of commercial contracting that opens up space to explore and identify features of contracting which enable it to go beyond private interests to also address public ones. To demonstrate this, the dissertation utilizes empirics from my case study, which is grounded in the transnational pineapple value chain between Ghana and Western Europe. This dissertation makes four key contributions to knowledge. First, it has developed a novel and generalizable conceptual framework of contractual governance through which activists and policymakers can address critical global agri-food governance challenges. It has also advanced practical options to do so. Second, this dissertation has important implications for global and private agri-food governance literatures, which have ignored the commercial contract and the influential role that it plays in the governance of food. Third, this thesis contributes to a body of existing literature indicating that “private” governance arrangements may be more capable than many often given them credit for in governing in democratically legitimate ways over issue areas of broad public interest. Finally, this thesis contributes empirical data in a field and area of study which is notoriously opaque and inaccessible. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This dissertation examines the potential of private contracts to increase the sustainable and ethical production and consumption of food. It argues that contracts are more capable of regulating over important issues that are of common concern than they are given credit for. It also argues that commercial contracts have particular features that make them well-suited to regulating long-distance relationships that span the borders of countries and include a variety of different stakeholders. This is noteworthy, because the regulation of long-distance relationships is becoming both more common and important in the world today. To demonstrate my arguments, the dissertation uses data taken from interviews with pineapple farmers and exporting companies in Ghana who produce pineapple for supermarkets in Europe. It also draws on interviews from public regulators in the European Commission, and international organizations, as well as lawyers, academics and private standard-setting bodies in agriculture such as GlobalGAP.

The aim of this dissertation is to expand upon current understandings of the emergent global phenomenon that is private authority. Private authority is a process wherein private actors create, implement, and enforce rules aimed at managing global problems. As private authority is becoming increasingly important in the conduct of global governance, broadening our understanding of it will serve the field of International Relations. In this dissertation I argue that private actors are not simply outgrowths of structures or certain material conditions, rather they are purposive actors strategically pursuing an agenda. As such, explaining private authority requires an examination of the constitutive elements that underlie this social phenomenon––to which I apply an innovative conceptual and analytical framework that combines social network theory with discourse analysis. I applied these tools to two cases taken from the environmental sector––forests and fisheries. I found that as a result of the development of a greater networked character to environmental politics, the actors that were best able to generate and wield private authority were those that were able to construct discursive nodal points around which other competing actors could converge––at the level of identity. The construction of nodal points placed these private actors in privileged positions in-between competing networks––making them network connectors. In this position they are able to facilitate the flow of power across networks and convert such into private authority, at a rate greater than that of their competitors. As related to the cases, I found that in forests and fisheries sectors it was the Forest Stewardship Council and Marine Stewardship Council that emerged as the most prominent and expansive private authorities. They did so as a result of their ability to construct a nodal point around their tailored definition of what sustainable development meant, and looked like in practice. This placed them in-between two powerful networks (the environmental NGO network and the industrial network), facilitating the flow of power between them, and leveraging such to expand their programs beyond that of competing programs. Thus, social position plays a crucial role in determining the success of private authority programs.

<p>The global HIV/AIDS pandemic has emerged alongside a changing world order marked by the growing power and authority of business, new constraints on public authority and policy autonomy, and new global hierarchies, inequalities, and contradictory tendencies. These conditions have helped midwife new configurations of public and private power, authority, and relations and shaped normative and operating environments for global health governance. In these contexts, public-private partnerships emerged as an institutional experiment, ostensibly to address health governance gaps and failures, including access to HIV and AIDS medicines in the global South. This study investigates the growth and roles of private authority in health governance through the lens of four case studies of public-private partnerships intended to enhance access to HIV and AIDS medicines in the global South. The study reveals that public-private partnerships in health emerged from this history as institutional experiments, yet not convincingly as functionalist responses to governance gaps and failures. The history demonstrates that private business actors opted to engage in partnerships in the contexts of a convergence of social, political, and commercial pressures, and normative and structural transformations in the world order. The case study partnerships emerged as accommodation or <em>trasformismo </em>strategies which offered concessions in an attempt to neutralise and co-opt social contestation around treatment access, without succumbing to demands for deeper structural and legislative reforms. These strategies offer bilateral, narrow, and tactical contributions in a framework of poor design, governance, accountability, and equity considerations and obligations, and are ultimately unconvincing in their commitment or capacity to expand access to HIV and AIDS medicines. Ultimately, public-private partnerships in health present practical, strategic, and normative consequences that necessitate new approaches to reform and/or serious reconsideration of their role and prospects in global health governance.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis presents a case study of Microsoft Corporation’s Partners in Learning (PiL) program, an example of transnational policy authority in education, with two embedded case studies of PiL in Jordan and South Africa. The constructivist and rationalist approaches highlight the changing nature of governance through the cultural and strategic shifts that led to Microsoft’s policy role in education. Microsoft’s strategic profit interests and its corporate-social-responsibility aspiration to play a policy role in education influenced its educational footprint. From a top-down perspective, Microsoft used supranational forms of power by implementing its global PiL blueprint through similar PiL programs worldwide. From a bottom-up perspective, Microsoft used “localization practices” by engaging different subnational agents and used different strategies to gain footholds in two very different political and policy contexts. Microsoft’s top-down and bottom-up approaches link the supranational policy arena to the subnational or subgovernmental. Microsoft’s economic power and strategic engagement gave it entry into education. It gained expert authority from its extensive history and experience in education. Its expert authority was experessed through strategic relationship building through diplomacy and partnerships, policy networks, and the sharing of best practices. The company was however not able to claim absolute legitimacy because of resistance in both countries. This thesis highlights that at the governmental level, sovereignty does not disappear when transnational corporations become involved in education at the national level. Instead, nation- states become strategic sites for the restructuring of global policy roles. The Jordanian government became a public facilitator, by working with Microsoft to implement a stand-alone PiL program. The South African government became a public integrator, by implementing the PiL program within government policies and programs. Power was also redistributed within both countries, moving away from government education officials towards the monarchy in Jordan and the presidency in South Africa. The findings of the study highlight the need for corporations engaged in public education to be governed within instituted accountability measures, for appropriate partnership frameworks, and for governance tools that can both effectively engage companies in education and ensure that they work within common goals and values set out by international education organizations.

This thesis presents a case study of Microsoft Corporation’s Partners in Learning (PiL) program, an example of transnational policy authority in education, with two embedded case studies of PiL in Jordan and South Africa. The constructivist and rationalist approaches highlight the changing nature of governance through the cultural and strategic shifts that led to Microsoft’s policy role in education. Microsoft’s strategic profit interests and its corporate-social-responsibility aspiration to play a policy role in education influenced its educational footprint. From a top-down perspective, Microsoft used supranational forms of power by implementing its global PiL blueprint through similar PiL programs worldwide. From a bottom-up perspective, Microsoft used “localization practices” by engaging different subnational agents and used different strategies to gain footholds in two very different political and policy contexts. Microsoft’s top-down and bottom-up approaches link the supranational policy arena to the subnational or subgovernmental. Microsoft’s economic power and strategic engagement gave it entry into education. It gained expert authority from its extensive history and experience in education. Its expert authority was experessed through strategic relationship building through diplomacy and partnerships, policy networks, and the sharing of best practices. The company was however not able to claim absolute legitimacy because of resistance in both countries. This thesis highlights that at the governmental level, sovereignty does not disappear when transnational corporations become involved in education at the national level. Instead, nation- states become strategic sites for the restructuring of global policy roles. The Jordanian government became a public facilitator, by working with Microsoft to implement a stand-alone PiL program. The South African government became a public integrator, by implementing the PiL program within government policies and programs. Power was also redistributed within both countries, moving away from government education officials towards the monarchy in Jordan and the presidency in South Africa. The findings of the study highlight the need for corporations engaged in public education to be governed within instituted accountability measures, for appropriate partnership frameworks, and for governance tools that can both effectively engage companies in education and ensure that they work within common goals and values set out by international education organizations.