The Role of Law in the Development Transition to a Knowledge-Based Economy – A Study of Namibia’s Drive towards a Sustainable Biotechnology Regulation

Namibia is a country rich in natural resources, and in order to better utilise those resources, it is seeking to move towards a knowledge-based economy (KBE) by 2030, while ensuring sustainable development. This thesis seeks to examine how law can be harnessed to promote the objective of KBE in a sustainable manner. It considers the legal challenges faced by Namibia in integrating and reconciling national, social, economic and environmental objectives in tandum with its international obligations, specifically the 2004 Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and trade laws. By analysing the emerging normative and institutional tensions in the implementation of the biosafety law, the study concludes that Namibia has adopted an all-encompassing biosafety framework over and above its international obligations. While this is justified by its socio-economic and environmental context, its implementation and enforcement portrays foreseeable legal challenges mainly with regard to reconciling the conflicting environmental/biosafety and trade norms imposed by the fragmented specialised sub-systems of international law. The main argument is that international law transposes conflicting norms into domestic legal systems without guidance on reconciling them, and this causes implementation difficulties in Namibia. This again constrains domestically instigated development initiatives—in this case KBE—while defying sustainable development imperatives. Therefore, implementing the biosafety law in a sustainable manner will need proactive and innovative legal solutions. Using a normative framework from the perspective of law and development theory and third world approaches to international law (TWAIL), this thesis aims to find a legal solution for the sustainable regulation of biosafety alongside the parameters of the applicable international law, specifically the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the trade instruments.