By Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Chair of the UN Committee for Development Policy and Professor of International Affairs, The New School

In a few days, world leaders will gather at UN Headquarters for the Summit of the Future (SoF). The origins of the Summit lie in the acknowledgment, accentuated during the COVID-19 pandemic, that countries need to come together in new ways and to strengthen their cooperation in order to face contemporary and future global challenges. During the pandemic, the need for change was particularly clear in the issues of access to medicines and life-saving technology and social costs of the digital divide.

At the time of writing, there is still no agreement on the Pact for the Future, but within the very vast scope of issues addressed in its successive revisions, there is acknowledgment of both the potential of science, technology, and innovation (STI) to accelerate the realization of the UN’s development agendas, and of the growing divide in terms of access to life-changing technologies. The potential of STI remains, in fact, vastly under-realized, particularly in developing countries – but also for public interest purposes across the world.

At the same time, the rapidly changing global economy and innovation landscape, in the context of multiple and compounding crises, risks accentuating existing divides and pushing people and countries further behind. For these reasons, the Committee for Development Policy (CDP) – of which I serve as chair – devoted its work to the challenges of innovation ecosystem for equity, structural change, and development. Our key conclusions – as reported to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) – are as follows.

First, policy frameworks need to be reassessed to ensure that the potential of STI for development is fulfilled. Effective innovation systems must be created that address both the long-standing challenges and consequences of a new generation of global shifts. These longstanding challenges include: the undersupply of technologies for many development priorities; extreme concentration of technological investments and capacity in a few countries; severe inequities in access to its products, as became brutally evident during the pandemic, and in the education systems; and ineffective arrangements for the transfer of technology (including those under the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, known as the TRIPS agreement).

Recent global shifts are creating a new ecosystem of innovation for sustainable development: the rise of financialization and the increasing importance of intangibles; the advance of the fourth industrial revolution; demographic changes; the energy transition and changes in geopolitics tied to the distribution of critical minerals; and developments in global agriculture. These new trends can work for or against sustainable development and public priorities, depending on how they are harnessed. This requires revisiting the existing frameworks and institutions and defining new national and STI policy frameworks to ensure innovation serves public priorities and sustainable development.

Second, intellectual property rights (IPRs) are a key public policy tool to ensure the innovation ecosystem contributes to development, structural change, equity, and resilience building. They have the dual objective of generating incentives to technological research and innovation while ensuring the dissemination of its benefits. However, they are not being used effectively. In current systems, intellectual property protection often far exceeds what would be necessary to promote innovation and leads to high prices and an undersupply of public goods, reducing the global dissemination of the benefits of innovation.

The third conclusion is that developing countries can make more effective use of existing policy space to pursue their development priorities and to address contemporary challenges such as those associated with climate change and the energy transition, the rise of the digital creative industries, or the need to ensure preparedness for future pandemics. International agreements leave governments the policy space to balance the goals of innovation and access through flexibilities such as compulsory licensing and government procurement. These flexibilities are well established in legal frameworks and practice in technologically advanced economies. However, developing countries face obstacles in making use of them due to gaps in information, trade sanctions and other forms of political pressure, as well as incompatible national legal frameworks.

More effective use can also be made of IPRs to stimulate local innovation through instruments such as copyright in creative industries, utility models for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and the protection of Indigenous knowledge in design. Flexibilities can be utilized more proactively for public priorities, for example to reduce the cost of medicines as part of a pandemic response strategy, accelerate the adoption of clean energy technologies, or as a broader element of developing countries’ industrial policies. New challenges, like the energy transition, will require new approaches, such as co-development and co-ownership mechanisms.

International organizations should provide developing countries with proactive support at the country level for the development of intellectual property policy frameworks and their deployment as a development policy tool, as well as the implementation of TRIPS flexibilities and other mechanisms to pursue public interest. International organizations should also expand their work on global governance for the ethical use of new technologies. The importance of innovation and IPRs also needs to be elevated in the least developed country (LDC) graduation process and in the development of smooth transition strategies.

Finally, the global system to support innovation for development needs to be reassessed in order to respond to the challenges of the 21st century. There are multiple experiences across the developing world from which to draw to ensure the system is fit for purpose, but more policy research and experience sharing are necessary. For example, there is great potential for the expansion of collaborative research and development, such as in the CGIAR model, in which research on food production is patented but access to technology is free, or the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which is illustrative of an opportunity to develop a coherent regional IPR policy that supports structural transformation, inclusion, and equity.

I am hopeful that the outcomes of the Summit of the Future and the initiatives that are put under way in its wake advance the objective of making STI work for everyone, rather than perpetuating a system that aggravates inequality and exclusion, particularly in health.

For more information on the work of the CDP, please visit https://cdp.un.org.