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With the wave of digitalisation, institutions across countries are pushing for the creation of open data and their governance. FAIR Data Principles have initiated the publishing of open research data to the key stakeholders and practitioners in the low- and middle-income countries to meet their developmental goals through practical usage in problem-solving. Open Data, which is part of the Open Science movement, has transformed the regime structure at a transnational level for the governance of critical issues surrounding water and energy. This paper provides a baseline survey to look into the various open data initiatives in the areas of water and clean energy across countries in general and India in particular. Given the multifaceted challenges around the water-energy nexus existing in India, it is critical to identifying the open data initiatives and studying their governance at the country level. Since governance requires the participation of various institutions and multiple stakeholders, the research aims at highlighting the various initiatives such as participation of institutions and the application of Creative Commons (CC) licensing terms in the open data governance for clean energy and water sectors in India.

Despite attempts to harmonize intellectual property rights (IPR) across countries, significant inter-country diversity exists in their "strength." Our paper situates the literature on IPR in the broader literature on institutions to gain insights into the way economic performance, and historical political contingencies shape IPR, and put these hypotheses to empirical scrutiny using cross-country regression analysis. Such analyses are often criticized for treating institutions as exogenous variables. We develop a simultaneous equation model to address these concerns. We find that political treatise, institutional complementarities, and historical processes all shape strength of IPR in a country. However, strengthening IPR, while augmenting income, does not seem to favour the cause of human development.Keywords intellectual property rights diversity; historico-political contingencies; economic performance; simultaneous equation system While the importance of institutions for economic performance has been well recognized in the academic literature, considerable amount of ambiguities still prevail on the impact of intellectual property rights on the various aspects of economic performance. The last few decades have witnessed a major policy activism to harmonise and strengthen IPR laws across countries, purportedly, to facilitate economic growth and development. Concurrently, we have also seen a phenomenal growth both in the academic literature on intellectual property rights, as well as in policy documents, criticizing the attempts to strengthen IPR, beyond a point, on grounds of reduced innovative activities (Gallini, 2002;Furukawa, 2007), promoting monopolies (Phelps, 2013) as well as preventing access to new medicine and health care facilities (WHO 2005), mostly based on case studies. Quite often, however, the need for robust empirical findings have been felt to verify these claims. Besides, a few studies have also pointed out differential impact of strong IPR across developmental stages, highlighting that the institutions, besides shaping economic performance, may be shaped by the level of economic performance of a country (Helpman, 1993). In other words, the relationship between institutions and economic performance is two-way, a point emphasised also by recent theories of institutional economics. The empirical literature on IPR has, however, remained occupied only with the one-way impact of IPR, that too on narrowly defined measures of economic performance, which often focused either on inward foreign direct investment, or gross domestic product.Most studies on intellectual property rights also do not pay adequate attention to the systemic nature of the institution of intellectual property rights, curtailing our empirical understanding on the historical political contingencies, and institutional complementarities that shape IPR in a major way. In this context, the empirical cross-country studies on institutions and economic performance are often criticized on a specific methodological ground. Most of these stu...

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