WIPO's focus on SDG 9 overlooks the role of IP in exacerbating global inequalities and hindering sustainable development.

If the promise of the SDGs lies in their newfound appreciation of the essential connections between equality and sustainability, then WIPO’s myopic focus on innovation and SDG 9 promises little in return. Certainly, it fails to grapple with the role that intellectual property has played in supporting and compounding global inequalities. IP law’s celebrated role in incentivizing innovation and creativity depends on its capacity to establish a system of effective exclusive rights which, by definition, exclude. The IP system necessarily restricts access to new technologies, pharmaceuticals (including life-saving vaccines), research data, processes and outputs, and educational materials—resources that are vital to sustainable development and equality—and it does so by design. Whether the benefits of the incentives that it provides to innovators and creators sufficiently compensate the public for the costs of its exclusions is a matter of perennial debate, of course; but even within the IP system we have, with the incentives–access trade-off that it assumes to be necessary, there are policy levers that could be pulled to lessen the harms of exclusion and accelerate the benefits for sustainability and equality (ranging from compulsory licences and patent pools to mandatory or expanded limits and exceptions).53 More out-of-the-box thinking could explore how IP’s incentives might be adjusted (heightened, reduced, or withheld) to better encourage innovation in clean or green technologies and/or disincentivize the development of environmentally harmful products and processes.54 IP rights in respect of certain subject matters could be accompanied by additional requirements or conditioned on fulfilment of added responsibilities, whether that is knowledge-sharing, tech-transfer, profit-sharing, or obligatory reinvestment in sustainability R&D. As it stands, however, a widespread but misplaced faith in IP’s net benefits seems to be limiting our imagination, foreclosing the possibility that the IP system will be reoriented to become part of a sustainable solution. Rather, it appears to have solidified into an essential part of the status quo—an obstacle, in other words, to transformational change. This much should really be obvious. Less obvious, perhaps, is how implicated the IP system might be in supporting or compounding gender inequality, in particular. Intellectual property laws are ostensibly gender neutral, after all, drawing no distinction between men and women when it comes to entitlement or enforcement. It should never come as a surprise, however, that facially neutral laws can produce substantively unequal outcomes, reinforcing gendered power disparities and social inequalities underneath the veil of legal objectivity. Here, too, I argue, there is insufficient appreciation of IP’s complicity in producing and sustaining the very gender inequality that WIPO now seems to think an unaltered IP system can somehow solve.