Notes From Doctoral Diary: TACIP, Turku (20 – 21 August 2025)

[lokesh vyas]

Every once in a while, one happens to be at an academic gathering that feels less like a “conference” and more like a genuine coming together of minds, hearts, and histories. Yes. And TACIP, 2025, held in the strikingly serene city of Turku, in Finland, was one such experience for me.

TACIP stands for Technical Assistance as an Enabler of the Constitutionalising of Intellectual Property Norms in Africa. (Quite a mouthful term, isn’t it …?) For context, TACIP is a long-term project funded by the Research Council of Finland, helmed by Professor Daniel Opoku Acquah, whose scholarship on technical assistance and its role in rooting TRIPS-plus norms in Africa is both rigorous and refreshing. In this post, I share my experience of TACIP, along with brief remarks on what I observed and presented there. (Please know that this is very much my account of the event and my understanding thereof. To avoid any risk of misrepresentation, I have avoided summarising or commenting on all the presentations in detail. Any inaccuracies, of course, are mine alone.)

Before diving in, it’s worth noting that “technical assistance” is not an easy term to pin down. Broadly, it refers to a mix of financial, technical, institutional, and knowledge-based support provided to designated beneficiaries. The definitional elasticity is part of its power, I’d say. It can cover everything from drafting model laws to training other personnel, from sending experts to funding new infrastructures. This definitional ambiguity, I believe, also makes its history and politics harder to trace. See generally WIPO’s Technical Assistance webpage to take stock of the diverse activities under this umbrella.

About TACIP, 2025

Themed “Intellectual Property and Technical Cooperation in Africa: Law, Policy and Path,” the conference brought together a strong group of scholars, mainly from Africa—both those based on the continent and those working abroad. The keynotes set the tone for the discussions. The event opened with a keynote by Professor Ruth Okediji, who presented her ongoing empirical research on technical assistance. While underscoring the persistent difficulty of accessing reliable data from WIPO and highlighting its central role in global norm harmonisation, she claimed that although technical assistance has expanded to an unprecedented scale, it has been done with geographic concentration. Meaning, not all developing countries receive comparable levels of support, but are advanced towards a select few. Even more intriguingly, she claimed a reverse relationship between the amount of technical assistance received and the share of resident-origin applications, thus suggesting that higher inflows of assistance do not necessarily foster stronger domestic innovation activity.

The second keynote was delivered by Dr. Edward Kwakwa (WIPO), who, drawing on his long-standing institutional experience, reflected on the past and present Technical Assistance endeavours, suggesting the constant juggle between the developmental aspirations and the gravitational pull of global IP orthodoxies. The third keynote, by Professor Justin Hughes, offered a more provocative and experiential perspective. Focusing on artisans and entrepreneurs, he, among other things, advanced the idea of a peer-to-peer model of technical assistance—supporting one sector at a time—while pushing back against the much-bandied “balanced IP” agenda in TA. One of my favourite parts of the conference was an informal-ish panel discussion on the final day, where the keynote speakers took questions and offered candid, thoughtful advice for young scholars. It was both insightful and encouraging.

The event, in total, entailed seven panels, each focusing on a different aspect of technical assistance and offering thought-provoking ideas. While it would be impossible for me to recount or do justice to all of them—both because I cannot recall every detail and because a brief remark would hardly capture their depth—I will instead focus on the panel in which I participated.

What We Presented: Genealogy of Technical Assistance?

I spoke in the 2nd panel titled “Foundations and Historical Trajectories of Intellectual Property in Africa,” chaired by Dr. Susan Isiko Štrba, a very kind scholar and a senior policy advisor at  International Lawyers and Economists for Development, Geneva. This panel brought together three scholars: Juliet Ogbodo, who presented on “What Legal Transplants Teach Us About IP-Related Technical Assistance in Africa”; Véronique Pouillard, who spoke on “Intellectual Property and Legal Regimes in Congo: A Historical Study of the Transitions to the Colonial and Early Decolonization Periods”; and myself. I presented my work-in-progress with Daniel titled “Language and Power in International IP Law: A Reading from the Global South”.

Our paper had two main agendas: one, to trace the genealogy of technical assistance by underscoring both the conditions of possibility, i.e., what made technical assistance thinkable/conceivable in the first place. And the conditions of centrality, i.e., what made it so central/essential to the current IP regime. Two, offer a methodological intervention—a way of reading that looks beyond the binary of presence/absence, speech/silence, linguistic change/stasis, and instead asks how silence itself acquires meaning through what is spoken/uttered/changed. Put otherwise, we claim that meanings do not only change when provisions change textually; even provisions that have remained textually intact over time may acquire new meanings through shifting discourse.

We take Berne Convention as the archaeological site to exemplify our claims, which contains two kinds of provisions: substantive provisions, where actual norm-setting occurs (e.g., defining which works should be protected or what reservation countries can make), and administrative provisions, which facilitate, manage, or oversee the substantive framework (e.g., the colonial clause, rules on conducting revision conferences, or the establishment of an international bureau).

Substantive provisions, for instance, can be divided into two further types: conventional rules (e.g., specifying categories of protectable works or defining rights) and referral rules (e.g., provisions that leave discretion to national legislatures, such as Article 10 on the quotation right or Article 9(2)’s three-step test). Articles like 17 and 20, which have remained textually stable, also belong to this category, as they authorise states to make reservations or conclude special agreements. (We borrowed this categorisation from Claude Masouyé’s article, “The Berne Convention from 1886 to 1967,” published in a short booklet titled International Copyright: Needs of the Developing Countries (Government of India, 1967). Unfortunately, the text is not available online. If you’d like to read it, let me know, I can share a copy.)

When the Berne Convention was first adopted in 1886, it contained 21 articles; by the 1979 revision, this number had grown to 39. While this expansion in itself is not surprising, the way it unfolded is telling. Because, over time, both changed and unchanged provisions underwent semantic shifts. 

Sample Article 17 here. In 1886, “protected works” (then Article 4, now Article 2) didn’t explicitly include photography or choreography. That meant states could regulate those fields without worrying about Article 17. But once photography entered the protected category, Article 17 suddenly became relevant—even though its text hadn’t changed. Similarly, Article 20’s permission for “special agreements” narrowed in scope once the substantive field grew denser. These are just indicative examples, of course. 

But the upshot is that the meanings don’t live in their text alone, but instead are produced through the performative relation with other provisions. Over time, as substantive rules became increasingly expansive, referral rules gradually narrowed. And it is precisely at this juncture that technical assistance becomes thinkable. Put otherwise, when states operate under diverse national laws but are then required within a shared international framework, an institutional body becomes requisite to mediate, harmonise, and guide implementation. This gave rise to the International Bureau of the Union (which later became BIRPI, WIPO’s predecessor). 

As the system grew more complex, with diverse and mismatched needs in member states (especially newly decolonised developing countries), so too did the need for a more elaborate administrative apparatus. By 1948, a notable administrative element emerged with the creation of a 12-member committee, known as the Comité permanent de l’Union littéraire et artistique (Permanent Committee of the Literary and Artistic Union), to provide regular policy guidance to the union. While this community included members from both developed and developing countries, we hypothesise that it marked the institutionalisation of technical assistance as a central feature of the global IP norm-setting. 

From our research, we (tentatively!) identify three moments in the genealogy of technical assistance:

1. 1886 — with the creation of the International Bureau under the Berne Convention, laying the institutional groundwork. The Bureau’s 1896 report already records instances of its expert advice to various stakeholders upon request.
2. 1948 — the establishment of a permanent committee to provide regular policy guidance, reflecting the growing complexity of the system.
3. WIPO era post 1970 — the formalisation of technical assistance as a central part of the international IP regime.

One could perhaps add the TRIPS Agreement (1994) as another turning point, when technical assistance was codified into trade law. See Article 67 on technical cooperation, which states that developed countries can assist developing countries in implementing TRIPS through mutual agreement. So, if WIPO, one can say that, provided technical assistance, its institutional skeleton, TRIPS (through its WTO force), lent it the teeth by tethering it to the multilateral trade framework. That said, these are just indicative stages at this point. We do not claim them as fixed timelines but instead flag them as useful heuristic markers for further historical research. The picture is very likely much messier, demanding further deliberation and nuance.

Conclusion

Overall, the conference was a great experience, offering much intellectual fodder to think through. One of the questions that it kindled in me is how and why UNESCO gradually stepped away from its early engagement with copyright. The archives show that it was deeply involved in post-colonial copyright debates (see, e.g. here and here), yet over time that charge shifted elsewhere. This can be a thread worth pulling. For those interested, keep an eye on the TACIP website, where recordings of the sessions may become available. The conference brochure enlists the participating scholars, making it easier to connect directly with anyone whose work resonates with yours. On a more personal note, I want to note something that felt particularly special. Given how rare it still is to see Indian scholars—especially those based in India—present their work at an international IP conference, I was pleased to see two professors from my alma mater, Nirma University, Gururaj Devarhubli and Taruna Jakhar, presenting their work at the event.

Okay. This was my experience of TACIP. See you in the next post.

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