15 Apr 2025
Brown Bag Seminar,
12:30 - 13:30,
Anna Nussbaum Auditorium and online,
Hallerstrasse 6, Bern, Switzerland
The law of international transfer of technology: conceptualising and comparing legal arrangements in international economic agreements
Technology inequality between countries is growing. Access to technology is essential to enable countries not only to respond to global challenges and crises, but also to set up a path for them to realise their sustainable development and innovation goals. However, there is a huge mismatch between technology offer and current needs and demands.
States are struggling to fulfil their international transfer of technology (ToT) obligations, and the emergence, development and implementation of international norms facilitating ToT are further hindered by the current context of geoeconomic competition for technology leadership. The bilateral turn in the international regulation of intellectual property (IP) rights and the growing complexity of bilateral trade and investment agreements have implications in terms of coherence between norms and transparency on applicable obligations between countries, but also in the policy space left for countries to experiment with ToT regulations. In parallel, part of the efforts in the ToT debate has shifted away from international economic law towards technology-specific sub-regimes for the transfer of environmental, climate and health technologies.
Under these circumstances, this paper investigates the role that international economic law instruments still have in creating legal arrangements facilitating ToT. For this purpose, in addition to WTO agreements, this paper has systematically collected and sorted regional and bilateral economic agreements signed between 2018 and 2024. To analyse this set of instruments, this research puts forward an analytical framework for analysing and comparing ToT obligations across different regimes in international law. It classifies ToT norms into cooperative and regulatory arrangements. Regulatory arrangements include measures that affect the protection of IP rights, establish terms and conditions of ToT agreements or create organisational criteria and performance requirements for ToT. Cooperative arrangements, on the other hand, consist of initiatives set up under a normative framework within or among international organisations, or in the form of partnerships. By applying a global governance framework of analysis to selected instruments, this study seeks to emphasise which ToT mechanisms are being used and implemented and which economic rationale they reproduce. The overarching purpose of this paper is to bring conceptual clarity for emerging ToT agreements and identify similarities, differences and potential synergies between the legal arrangements under analysis.
About the speaker
Felipe de Andrade is a PhD researcher funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO fellow). He is studying for a joint doctoral degree in Law at the University of Antwerp and KU Leuven, Belgium, and is currently a Visiting Research Fellow of the World Trade Institute (WTI) of the University of Bern. He obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil/2019) and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from the University of Antwerp (Belgium/2022, Master Mind scholarship awarded by the Flemish Ministry of Education and Training). His thesis is concerned with transfer of technology legal arrangements and intellectual property rights in the context of international economic partnerships and sustainable development. He has served as a teaching assistant and student researcher in both Brazil and Belgium, gaining extensive experience in intellectual property governance, intellectual property licensing, private international law, comparative legal research, and open science. He also interned at the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (2021).