For years the pharmaceutical industry succeeded in massively restricting the production of generic medicines and thus also impeding access to urgently needed treatments – particularly for people in the Third World. As justification, it cited the protection of intellectual property, detailed rules for which were laid down in the TRIPS agreement of 1994. However, rising states, working with civil-society allies, managed gradually to bring about an easing of patent-protection rights in favour of increased regard for the right to health, thus effecting a complete reversal in the norm hierarchy. The authors analyse this development and formulate a number of corresponding recommendations as to how changes in norms and orders might be successfully brought about in future. Saskia Scholz is a researcher in peace and conflict studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Technical University of Darmstadt. She is engaged as a Student Assistant in PRIF’s "Private Actors in the Transnational Sphere" research department. Professor Klaus Dieter Wolf is Deputy Director of PRIF and head of its "Private Actors in the Transnational Sphere" research department. He holds the chair in International Relations at the Institute of Political Science, Technical University of Darmstadt.