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Although more easily overlooked in mature heritage agri-food markets like the European Union, where Geographical Indication (GI) has become routinized over numerous decades, the creation and governance of GI frameworks is principally an activity of the state (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). While technical bodies, such as INAO (Institut national de l'origine et de la qualité) in France, have helped professionalize the regulation of GI products, many GI certification bodies worldwide are in ministries or government departments, such as agriculture, taxation, commerce, intellectual property, or rural development (Insight Consulting 2007). In fact, the choice of government department is often an indication of the underlying policy “goal” behind the adoption of a legal framework for GI: protecting intellectual property, encouraging exports, spurring rural development, safeguarding food heritage, etc. (Bramley et al. 2009). While these goals are not mutually exclusive, and indeed GI is often explicitly promoted as a mechanism for achieving simultaneous social, economic, and environmental ends (Giovannucci et al. 2009), the potential for doing so is often circumscribed by institutional barriers or prerogatives (Bartley 2011). Likewise, it is unclear why the state would relinquish the power to utilize GI for policy objectives deemed suitable for national development (Huysmans 2022). Indeed, many countries that have recently adopted sui generis GI laws, particularly in the Global South, often view direct state support for (certain) GI producers as critical for development (Biénabe and Marie-Vivien 2017; Chabrol et al. 2017; Durand and Fournier 2017).
This paper uses the region of Asia for evaluating the extent of state intervention in GI policy development and selection of GI products. Using qualitative data from interviews and observation in Japan, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Sri Lanka, and using secondary data for other Asian regions, a diversity of approaches and rationalities for state intervention in GI emerge, a finding which challenges the notion that institutional isomorphism would lead GI laws to converge on a hegemonic form (Beckert 2010). This aligns with recent findings that even core GI countries in Southern Europe reveal considerable variation and slippage (Penker et al. 2022). In Asia, state intervention often includes the prioritization of (a) products emblematic of national culture, (b) producers with existing (colonial) export value chains, (c) producer groups promising economic expansion, (d) heritage value, and (e) tourism value. Although not exclusively so, the personalities of each ministry or department are often expressed through their governmental approach, yielding wide institutional differences in the constitution of GI laws. Practically, this often shapes the intellectual property approach to GI (trademark vs sui generis) and also the precision of GI standards (PDO vs PGI). This has important consequences for the evaluation of applications, often causing the earlier GI products registered to align with the implementing agency, while subsequent registrations increasingly correspond to national policy priorities. Both these systemic and ad-hoc political mediations of GI frameworks diminishes the pressure of institutional isomorphism, leading to limited comparability of GI systems at the country level while increasing the opportunity for institutional innovation.
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