Access to essential medicines: Rationality and consensus in the conflict over intellectual property rights

This report summarizes deliberations over the Access to Essential Medicines held during a stakeholder dialogue process launched by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in 2001/2002. The dialogue process was designed to explore options of companies to address contested issues of intellectual property in their business strategies. To that end, companies were exposed to the concerns of stakeholders and urged to define responses to these concerns. The project involved major companies and transnational non-governmental organizations as well as renowned experts in the field of intellectual property rights. This paper briefly sketches the sociological dimensions of the project that relate to issues of rationality and governance. It then describes in detail the setup and the course of the dialogue process. Major steps in the process were provided through comprehensive surveys of argumentation which integrated all points raised in the deliberations and fed them back to the participants. On the basis of such recursive communication the participants constructed “conclusions” that exhibit a considerable amount of argumentative flexibility and represent gains in rationality. However, the consensus reached in the dialogue process remained partial. It stopped short of “governance” in the sense of a binding decision on the contested subject matter.