How Do Climate Change and Energy-related Partnerships Impact Innovation and Technology Transfer? Some Lessons for the Implementation of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are endorsed and applied across a number of global public policy arenas, from health to climate change. PPPs for sustainable development at the global level emerged after the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development as voluntary cooperative arrangements between governments and non-state actors to address and implement specific sustainability goals, but the role and relevance of these partnerships remain contested. This chapter addresses the relationship between partnerships and intellectual property rights as part of a broader inquiry into processes of technology transfer and institutional innovation. It scrutinizes whether climate and energy-related partnerships focus on technical implementation of existing technologies, technology transfer, knowledge dissemination, or innovation. It analyzes their performance related to tackling the problems they were set up to address, drawing on multi-year research on the emergence and effectiveness of PPPs for sustainable development, using the large Global Sustainability Partnerships Database to understand better the role and relevance of PPPs in contemporary global environmental governance.