Increasingly, countries in the Global South—notably South Africa, Brazil, and Indonesia—are introducing material transfer agreements (MTAs) into their domestic laws for the exchange of scientific material. The MTA is a contract securing the legal transfer of tangible research material between organizations such as laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, or universities. Critical commentators argue that these agreements in the Global North have come to fulfill an important role in the expansion of dominant intellectual property regimes. Taking Indonesia as a case, this article examines how MTAs are enacted and implemented differently in the context of research involving the Global South. Against the conventionally understood forms of contract that commodify and commercialize materials and knowledge, the MTA in the South can be understood as a legal technology appropriated to translate a formerly relational economy of the scientific gift to a market system of science. As a way of gaining leverage in the uneven space of the global bioeconomy, the MTA functions as a technology for ‘reverse appropriation’, a reworking of its usage and meaning as a way of countering some of the global power inequalities experienced by Global South countries. The operation of this reverse appropriation, however, is hybrid, and reveals a complex reconfiguration of scientific exchange amidst a growing push for ‘open science’.
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