Complex geopolitical debate surrounds the role of intellectual property (IP) in advancing and achieving the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs). Summarising and advancing this discourse, this prescient Companion is a thorough examination of how IP law interacts, influences and impacts each of the seventeen SDGs. This comprehensive Companion brings together an array of leading international experts to assess and interrogate how IP law impacts each specific SDG in turn. Providing in-depth analysis and invaluable insight, chapters explore IP’s role in ending poverty and inequality, improving food security, ensuring a sustainable environment, better regulating gene patents, and supporting health and well-being through access to medicines. This Companion deftly explores a variety of models of technology transfer and diffusion. Ultimately, the book provides a realistic overview of current progress towards the SDGs and a blueprint to reform IP institutions, agreements, and laws to achieve a more sustainable future. The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals will be an essential resource for academics, researchers, regulators and policymakers interested in the unique intersection between IP law and sustainable development. It will also prove a highly informative read for researchers specialising in development studies, as well as legal practitioners working in private law, technology law, comparative law and international law.

Science, Technology & Innovation and Intellectual Property: Leveraging Openness for Sustainable Development in Africa considers how the openness paradigm could empower Africa to leverage science, technology & innovation (STI) and intellectual property (IP) legislative and policy frameworks to support sustainable development. Specifically, it draws attention to how alignment of national policies with continental priorities and global aspirations will further Africa's development. The book highlights how knowledge governance systems interface with national systems of innovation and impact development by arguing that open science can be used to meet new challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the grand developmental challenges of food security, disease and climate change. It emphasises the need to synchronise national development plans, STI and IP policies with the AU's Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals, and it makes a case for how the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) IP Protocol may be used as a policy blueprint to guide AU member states in meaningfully nuancing their IP systems to support STI. It will be of particular interest to researchers, practitioners and policymakers working in the areas of IP law, STI, sustainable development, regional trade and cross-border business. Those with a focus on current regional integration in Africa and the latest developments regarding AfCFTA will benefit immensely from the book's discussion of the IP Protocol and the form it ought to take. Published by Juta in association with the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI)/National Research Foundation (NRF) SARChI Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development.Published by Juta in association with the Department of Science and Innovation (DSI)/National Research Foundation (NRF) SARChI Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development.