Historically, the use of legal frameworks to claim proprietary rights in the products of agricultural science was limited to the private sector. Public institutions, including CGIAR, treated their creations as the common heritage of humankind. Scientific, economic, and legal changes unsettled this public–private balance in the 1980s, provoking a reimagination of the role of intellectual property in research and development. Three distinct theories about how CGIAR should respond to the global expansion of intellectual property in agriculture emerged. Maximalists embraced proprietary legal claims, adaptationists advocated for cautious accommodation, and rejectionists viewed intellectual property as ancillary to the CGIAR mission. This chapter traces the history of intellectual property debates within CGIAR from 1990 to 2020, arguing that over time, the adaptationist approach prevailed as institutional governance structures developed. Although current policies permit each CGIAR center to embrace rejectionism or maximalism to a certain extent, the rejectionist theory has been marginalized at the system level, while a global capitalist approach to agricultural science has taken root.

The WHO is designed to take advantage of the benefits of cooperation on health. It provides a loosely centralized agency where governments can share information about health and threats to health and get assistance in dealing with both new emergencies and long-running problems. COVID-19 provides an illustration of the WHO’s capacity and limits in the face of new threats to health. More than any other organization in this book, the WHO has taken on partnerships with private organizations to fund and organize its programs, and the organization therefore provides an intriguing illustration of the hybridization of global authority between public agencies and private foundations.

Kindleberger’s 1985 presidential address to the American Economic Association launched the final stage in his career, even as the 1985 Plaza Accord launched the next stage in the development of the dollar system. Kindleberger’s high hopes after Plaza were ultimately disappointed but, learning from the period after Nixon’s 1971 abdication of US leadership, he shifted his hopes instead to the prospect of “muddling through.”