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UNCTAD-ICTSD
Regional Research Agenda
The Regional Research Agenda makes an important contribution
to the UNCTAD-ICTSD Project's objective of creating a critical mass
of intellectual property (IP) stakeholders in developing countries
to make effective use of IP policy for the promotion of their particular
development objectives. For this purpose, the Project has established
close collaboration with developing country universities and policy-oriented
research centres (think tanks) to strengthen these institutions'
capacities in IP-related research and policy formulation. As these
core partners reinforce their role as centres of expertise on intellectual
property rights (IPRs), they will assume a two-fold function:
a) to enhance communication, interaction and national and regional
stakeholder participation in the IP policy making process
b) to pool regional expertise to provide backstopping capacity in
the policy formulation process at the national, regional and international
level.
The Project currently collaborates with the following core partners:
Strengthening analytical capacity at the national and regional level
implies that the identified centres of excellence develop their
research skills on IP-related issues. To do so, the core partners,
in close collaboration with the Project, have established a regional
research agenda to work on those IP-related issues that at preceding
regional and national dialogues have been identified as being of
key relevance to the respective region (such as, e.g., the IP-competition
interface; access to knowledge and copyright; technology transfer;
geographical indications; and the protection of traditional knowledge
and genetic resources). To-date, there have been five of these regional
dialogues, each time followed by a national dialogue, in the following
regions:
The agreed research topics are addressed by regional experts in
a number of research papers (3-4 per region). These papers (link
to papers), while sponsored by the Project, are personal contributions
of the respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the views
of UNCTAD or ICTSD. These papers,
although region- and country-specific, apply in their findings to
other regions and are closely linked to ongoing negotiations at
the international level. Their wide use by regional stakeholders
is therefore encouraged.
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