Journal of the Korean Geographical Society ISSN:1225-6633(Print) 대한지리학회지

During the 1986-1994 Uruguay Round negotiations under the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (later World Trade Organization), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) was adopted by participating countries. TRIPS has not only allowed intellectual property to be introduced into international trade arenas, but also extended the scope of protection to biodiversity such as plant genetic material, arguing that intellectual property rights (IPRs) would help conserve biodiversity. In this paper, I aim to deconstruct the global IPRs regimes over biodiversity by adopting geographers’ sensitivity to place and scale as an analytical window. By investigating how all the issues regarding IPRs over biodiversity that are raised by diverse disciplines, such as environmental ethics, environmental economics and political economy approach, are scale-related, I demonstrate how biodiversity IPRs, and its introduction into international trade agreements, though separate issues with no inevitable relationship to one another, have been put together for the construction of global IPRs regimes. I argue that the notion on the construction of scale (i.e., rhetorical and discursive construct of globalization) can contribute to revealing how fragile global environmental conservation regimes are.