Bita Amani

The coda draws out several reoccurring themes at the heart of the relationship between IPRs and SDGs. These include: (1) the relationship between human rights and sustainable human development; (2) the role of international institutions and instruments; (3) the centrality of the nation state in reconciling competing obligations under trade-related intellectual property rights and human rights law; (4) the politics of private power and public law animating the inequalities between systems of exclusion with intellectual property rights exclusions and counter-movements and claims for inclusion through human rights instruments and pursuant to the global commitment made to the SDGs; and (5) the significance of partnerships and sustainable finance.

As public policy tools for development, intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes are state derived instruments that are said to generate necessary incentives for cultural production, invention, and meaning making with the promise of economic gains through the grant of exclusive rights and the attendant regulation of markets. While subjects are formally equal under the law, there is exclusivity to such rights with discriminatory distributive effects and disparate harms within and among nations. Substantive equality makes law and policy reform of domestic and international IPRs regimes imperative, though any remediation may be seen as pressure valves at best for faulty colonial property regimes that are ostensibly neutral. Examining the oft neglected socio-political context in which people live and create (some in adverse relation to and recognition by the state), can show how the baseline of equality in nationality and citizenship - the belonging to a state and as its beneficiary - assumed in IPRs regimes may prove illusory in patents, copyright, and trademark law, as some are more equal than others. This chapter maintains that when assessing the capacity of such instruments to meet global institutional objectives, as with the SDG 10 commitment to reduce inequalities within and among countries and UN 2030 Pledge to start with the most behind first, cultural, and socio-political contexts are critical to understanding the role and limits of IPRs, but so too for empowering people in the demand for change towards the eradication of all forms of inequality.

In a literature review, this chapter outlines the modern configuration of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 2015. It explains how the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is a ‘plan of action for people, planet, and prosperity’. This chapter provides a selective overview of the history of intellectual property and sustainable development - detailing landmark events and moments in the field. It explores the Stockholm Declaration 1972 and its approach to technology transfer. This chapter looks at the recognition of the United Nations Declaration on the Right to Development 1986. It highlights the work of Gro Harlem Brundtland in the formulation of the Brundtland Report on Sustainable Development. This chapter charts the range of environment and climate agreements established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and their implications for sustainable innovation. It explores the emergence of the Millennium Development Goals, and the work of the Commission on Intellectual Property Rights led by John Barton. This chapter considers the debate over the WIPO Development Agenda - particularly in respect of access to knowledge, access to essential medicines, and technology transfer. It explores the Rio+20 Summit, and its renewed focus on intellectual property, the environment, and sustainable development. This chapter highlights the public-private partnerships for sustainable development. It examines the influential work of Margaret Chon, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, and other key thinkers and authorities in this field. This chapter also notes the tensions between the Sustainable Development Goals, and trade and investment paradigms established by the TRIPS Agreement 1994 and TRIPS+ and TRIPS ++ Agreements.

The conclusion considers whether various forms of intellectual property help or hinder the realization of the 17 SDGs as a composite - and individually. The conclusion asks how the framing of the question of IPRs and SDGs may implicitly reinforce power relations through institutional commitment to neo-liberalism’s priority preference for capital production and commodity consumption. The conclusion examines the true capacity for transformative change under the 2030 Agenda - the building of a new house - with historical blueprints and the existing institutional scaffolding.