Navigating the Impact of Globalisation and Technology on Traditional Cultural Expressions

Traditional Cultural Expressions – the songs, dances, oral narratives, crafts, rituals, and symbols passed down through generations – are not museum artifacts. They are living systems of identity, knowledge, and community belonging. But today, two powerful forces – globalisation and rapid technological advancement – are reshaping the world in which these expressions exist, at a pace that indigenous and local communities are struggling to keep up with. The result is a double-edged reality: the same internet that can stream an Adivasi folk performance to a global audience can also allow a fashion brand to commercially exploit a sacred tribal motif without attribution or compensation. Understanding this duality is central to any serious discussion of TCE protection in the 21st century.

How globalisation puts TCEs at risk 🔗

Globalisation, in its simplest form, refers to the accelerated movement of goods, ideas, capital, and culture across national borders. For indigenous communities, this has historically meant exposure to more powerful dominant cultures that can dilute, commercialise, or simply erase traditional practices. Indigenous cultures are at the highest risk of cultural loss through cultural globalisation precisely because they often lack the power and influence required to protect their ways against the interests of more powerful outsiders.

The economic dimension is particularly sharp. When traditional art forms, designs, or performances enter global markets without the involvement of their source communities, the result is cultural commodification – where cultural expressions are stripped of meaning and reduced to products. Economic globalisation can lead to cultural commodification, where traditional cultural elements are marketed for profit, sometimes stripping them of their original meaning, with local traditions reduced to mere attractions for tourism rather than genuine expressions of identity.

There is also the problem of biopiracy – a term that extends beyond biological resources to describe the unauthorised appropriation of traditional knowledge and cultural expressions for commercial gain. For decades, biotech companies from more developed countries have obtained genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge from local indigenous communities in less developed but biodiversity-rich countries, then established monopolies over such resources through patent protection for commercial exploitation. In the TCE context, this manifests as clothing brands using sacred patterns, corporations trademarking folk symbols, or film studios commercialising traditional music without consent or credit.

India’s experience with misappropriation 🔗

India offers some of the most instructive examples of what is at stake. Western fashion designers have stolen and recreated ancient Indian products without giving credits or approvals, and spiritual traditions, music, and dances are commercialised in cinematography and advertising, stripping them of their original meaning. The controversies over patents on turmeric, neem, and basmati rice in the 1990s were watershed moments – they demonstrated that knowledge held collectively by Indian communities for centuries could be patented abroad as a novel “invention.” These cases gave India a rude awakening to the inadequacy of conventional IP law in protecting communal cultural heritage.

The failure of conventional IP frameworks 🔗

Standard intellectual property systems – copyright, patents, trademarks – were designed with individual authorship and fixed creation in mind. Copyright law is based on the idea of original authorship, and collective cultural expressions that have developed over time do not fit the concept of jointly authored works in the copyright system. TCEs are inherently communal, orally transmitted, and evolve across generations – which makes them fundamentally incompatible with a system that asks “who is the single author?” and “when exactly was this created?”

Additionally, geographical boundaries present a challenge in that the copyright system is nation-centric while TCEs are not, since they are often common to indigenous communities spanning many nations. A tribe that straddles the borders of two states or countries cannot neatly fit their cultural rights into any single national legal framework. The result, as the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs has noted, is that in the absence of effective legal recognition and protection, indigenous peoples’ intangible cultural heritage is often treated as being in the “public domain,” making misappropriation of their intellectual property widespread and ongoing.

Technology as both threat and tool 🔗

Technology cuts both ways. On one hand, digital tools have dramatically expanded the scale of misappropriation. Content can be copied, remixed, and commercialised instantaneously across jurisdictions. Digital technologies facilitate instantaneous access and reproduction of cultural content, leading to complex implications for TCE protection, and existing intellectual property rights frameworks inadequately address the unique needs of TCEs. Social media algorithms can amplify cultural content while entirely erasing its origin story and the community behind it.

On the other hand, technology also offers genuinely powerful tools for documentation, preservation, and community-controlled promotion of TCEs. Virtual museums, online cultural repositories, and digitised archives of indigenous art, literature, and oral traditions have been developed – with UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme aiming to preserve significant cultural documents in digital formats, making them accessible to people around the world. Social media platforms now allow communities to assert their own cultural narratives on a global stage without needing a publisher, a gallery, or a record label.

India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library: a model for defensive protection 🔗

India’s response to biopiracy-through-patents is one of the most studied examples of using technology for defensive protection of traditional knowledge. At the turn of the millennium, an expert group found that roughly 2,000 patents linked to India’s traditional knowledge in medicine were being granted annually around the world, which led to the proposal for the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library.

The TKDL, developed over a ten-year period by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in collaboration with the Ministry of AYUSH, documented knowledge about traditional medical treatments and the curative properties of plants – contained in ancient texts – and classified the information into a searchable database. It now contains 34 million pages across five international languages. By making this database available to major patent offices under access agreements, India was able to dramatically reduce the time needed to challenge wrongful patents – from years of litigation to a matter of weeks.

The TKDL’s key strength is its preventive logic: by demonstrating ownership and existence of traditional knowledge as “prior art,” communities can defeat third-party patent or copyright claims before they take hold. However, scholars have also pointed out that the TKDL remains a defensive protection that does not fully ensure that the benefits of the information reach its original holders. It prevents misappropriation but does not affirmatively vest rights in communities – a limitation that points toward the need for stronger, positive legal protection.

The international legal response: WIPO’s IGC and beyond 🔗

At the international level, the primary forum for addressing TCE protection is WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC). Many argue that, because of the international scale of the misappropriation and misuse of traditional knowledge, TCEs, and genetic resources, there is a need for well-established, culturally appropriate and predictable rules at the international level, and the IGC is the forum where negotiations for such an instrument take place.

The work of the IGC has led to the development of draft provisions for the protection of TCEs against misappropriation and misuse, drawing upon a wide range of community, national and regional experiences and developed in consultation with member states, indigenous peoples, civil society organisations and other interested parties. In May 2024, the WIPO Diplomatic Conference adopted a Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Traditional Knowledge – a first concrete multilateral step after nearly 25 years of negotiation. The IGC continues its work on a separate instrument specifically covering TCEs.

However, divisions persist. While many member states support objectives aimed at protecting TCEs and preventing their misappropriation, some states prefer objectives that emphasise the protection of innovation and a vibrant public domain – a position that the Indigenous Caucus has strongly opposed, arguing that it is TCEs themselves that require protection, not the public domain. These are not merely technical legal disagreements – they reflect deep tensions between the interests of industrialised nations and the demands of indigenous peoples globally.

The case for sui generis protection 🔗

The consensus among scholars and advocacy groups is that conventional IP law cannot be the primary vehicle for TCE protection. What is needed is a sui generis (of its own kind) legal framework – one built from the ground up to reflect the collective, intergenerational, and culturally specific nature of traditional expressions. Countries like Panama have implemented sui generis systems for the protection of indigenous knowledge, which have become models for combining cultural preservation with economic benefits.

In India, the call for a dedicated sui generis law is growing stronger. India introduced the Protection of Traditional Knowledge Bill, which proposes to establish a National Authority for Traditional Knowledge with powers to register and maintain a comprehensive digital database of TK, and importantly introduces the principle of “free prior informed consent” (FPIC) and mandates benefit-sharing with knowledge-holding communities. Though not yet enacted, this bill represents a significant shift – from merely preventing misuse to affirmatively empowering communities with recognised rights.

The concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) is central to any balanced approach. It means that communities must be consulted and must agree – in advance and with full information – before their cultural expressions are accessed, documented, or commercially used by outsiders. This shifts the framework from “how do we stop bad actors after the fact?” to “how do we build consent and benefit-sharing into the process from the start?”

Finding the balance: preservation, promotion, and protection together 🔗

The core challenge in this space is not choosing between globalisation and isolation – it is ensuring that communities themselves control how their TCEs interact with the outside world. Technology, when deployed under community direction, can be a powerful ally. In regions like the Andes, indigenous communities have utilised digital platforms to share their languages and cultural practices globally, helping revitalise interest and participation in local traditions among younger generations.

Models that emphasise local production should be encouraged – including minority languages, local media production, and trademark-like protections of cultural heritage – to avoid the majority culture making value judgments over the appropriateness of an indigenous people’s cultural heritage while still protecting the integrity of a community’s heritage without stifling its social exchange. This means TCE protection cannot be a top-down legal exercise alone. It must be accompanied by community-led digital archiving projects, culturally informed national legislation, equitable benefit-sharing mechanisms, and meaningful indigenous participation in international norm-setting processes.

For India specifically, the path forward involves combining the defensive utility of tools like the TKDL with the affirmative rights that a sui generis law would provide, while ensuring that indigenous communities are not merely subjects of protection but active architects of the frameworks that govern them. A strong sui generis system, grounded in global best practices and the actual experiences of indigenous peoples, would allow India to defend its intangible cultural heritage and lead by example in cultural justice.

What do you think? As technology makes TCEs easier to document and share globally, does community-controlled digital archiving offer sufficient protection – or does it inevitably open the door to wider misappropriation? And should India’s Protection of Traditional Knowledge Bill prioritise preventing commercial exploitation, or should it focus equally on ensuring that communities themselves can benefit financially from the global reach of their cultural expressions?

References

1. https://www.wipo.int/en/web/traditional-knowledge/resources/faqs
2. https://www.wjnt-law.com/tackling-biopiracy-how-wipos-latest-treaty-safeguards-indigenous-rights