The World Intellectual Property Organization and the sustainable development agenda: new article

My article "The World Intellectual Property Organization and the sustainable development agenda" is now published.  This paper was developed as a keynote talk for the Intellectual Property and Sustainable Development Conference which took place on September 6, 2018 at the Queensland University of Technology.

Abstract
The UN’s Agenda for Sustainable Development is being taken up throughout the international system, including at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This article examines WIPO’s approach to the sustainable development agenda in light of its past approaches to development. In the first part of this article, I outline some of the longstanding major critiques of the discourse of sustainability, noting that these critiques anticipated the current lamentable status of a sustainable development agenda for WIPO. Next, I discuss the history of development agendas at WIPO in the context of WIPO’s history and role at the centre of the global intellectual property system. I then ask what role intellectual property has to play in the SDGs. I conclude by suggesting that an adequate agenda for sustainable development is unlikely to be developed at WIPO and must, rather, come from outside.

Read the full article.

Citation: Bannerman, Sara. "The World Intellectual Property Organization and the sustainable development agenda." Futures 122(2020): 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2020.102586

Thanks to Professor Matthew Rimmer and the QUT IP and Innovation Law Research Program for their invitation to the conference. Thanks also to Emmanuel Appiah for his research assistance. This research would not have been possible without the support of, and funding from, McMaster University and the Canada Research Chairs program.

Does IP have a role in sustainable development? Of course it does!

Does intellectual property have a role in sustainable development?  Of course it does!  But the World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN agency, seems uncertain as to whether it has a role to play in implementing the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

As I note in a draft book chapter, WIPO's preliminary analysis of the ways in which its work supported SDGs viewed most of WIPO’s work as contributing to SDG 9, the building of infrastructure and industrialization, as well as goal 8, that of economic growth.

Surprisingly few of WIPO’s activities were viewed by WIPO as contributing to the SDGs of education, hunger, protecting biodiversity, combating climate change, or ensuring human health.

"Developed" countries argue "that only a few goals apply to the work of WIPO, and others argue that there should be no ‘cherrypicking’ as all the goals in one way or another do apply to WIPO’s work as a UN agency."  The view of the "developed" countries, here, is completely ridiculous; it is clear that intellectual property plays an important role in relation to many SDGs, including those related to food and agriculture, health, innovation, climate change, biodiversity, and technology transfer.

The world intellectual property system, at present, also sometimes works contrary to achievement of the SDGs, by locking up agricultural innovation, inflating drug prices, stalling innovation, rewarding the invention and sale of dirty technologies, locking up biodiversity, and preventing technology transfer. There is no shortage of proposals for reform that would help to address these problems.  (See the work of Peter Drahos, Matthew Rimmer, and Ahmed Abdel-Latif, among  many others.)  Industry players note the important role of intellectual property  in potentially stalling climate-friendly innovation; this is why Tesla has adopted open patent policies to encourage the take-up and spread of electric vehicle technology.

WIPO and its member states should acknowledge the links between intellectual property and both sustainable and unsustainable development.  The UN sustainable development agenda requires WIPO, as a UN agency, and its member states to build and retool world intellectual property institutions for sustainable development. 

FT: India PM calls for Access-to-Green-Technology

India's Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, is calling for an Access to Green Technology regime, similar to the Access to Medicine Regime, that would create rules requiring the sharing of intellectual property in green technologies with poorer countries. The Financial Times reports.