The Elgar Companion to Intellectual Property and the Sustainable Development Goals

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, public law, technology law, comparative law and international law.