The idea of benefit-sharing has, over the past fifteen years, taken hold in several prominent arenas of research and development, from pharmaceutical, oil, and mineral ‘prospecting’ to human genetic research. Broadly, the idea refers to a commitment to channel some kind of returns – whether monetary or non-monetary – back to a range of designated participants: ‘affected communities,’ source communities or source nations, participants in clinical trials, genetic disease patient groups. Derived from stakeholder theory and post-neoliberal attempts to ‘harness’ market-based activity and intellectual property to social and environmental ends, benefit-sharing is often framed simultaneously as a matter of justice, as a proxy for (or a swerve around) property rights, and as a ‘non-market’ tool for both encouraging and redistributing ‘value production.’ The relationship between an ethic and politics of benefit-sharing and intellectual property is complex and under constant re-negotiation. This essay sketches out some dimensions of that relationship, with a pointed question in mind: what might the recent proliferation of benefit-sharing suggest about the stability and legitimacy of intellectual property itself as a regime of governance?
