Low-Carbon Technology Transfer

From Rhetoric to Reality

David G. Ockwell, Alexandra Mallett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781138110014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136327650
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Low carbon technology transfer to developing countries has been both a lynchpin of, and a key stumbling block to a global deal on climate change. This book brings together for the first time in one place the work of some of the world's leading contemporary researchers in this field. It provides a practical, empirically grounded guide for policy makers and practitioners, while at the same time making new theoretical advances in combining insights from the literature on technology transfer and the literature on low carbon innovation.

The book begins by summarizing the nature of low carbon technology transfer and its contemporary relevance in the context of climate change, before introducing a new theoretical framework through which effective policy mechanisms can be analyzed. The north-south, developed-developing country differences and synergies are then introduced together with the relevant international policy context. Uniquely, the book also introduces questions around the extent to which current approaches to technology transfer under the international policy regime might be considered to be 'pro-poor'. Throughout, the book draws on cutting edge empirical work to illustrate the insights it affords. The book concludes by setting out constructive ways forward towards delivering on existing international commitments in this area, including practical tools for decision makers.

PART I

New Analytic Approaches

1

INTRODUCTION

Low-carbon Technology Transfer – From Rhetoric to Reality

David Ockwell and Alexandra Mallett

Climate change is considered by many to be one of the most pressing issues facing society today (IPCC, 2007). Potential solutions to the problem are complex and multi-faceted, involving a range of possible changes to lifestyles, ways of doing business, growing food, using land, and producing and consuming energy. Indeed, some commentators argue that it challenges the desirability of commitments to sustained economic growth that lie at the very heart of neo-liberal thinking (e.g. Jackson, 2011).

Due to the significant proportion of global emissions that are related to burning fossil fuels for energy—estimated to be 56.6 per cent (IPCC, 2007)—and the difficulty in decoupling energy from economic growth (Ockwell 2008), attempts to mitigate future climate change have prioritized the development and deployment of low carbon technologies. Low carbon technologies are defined in this book as technologies that aim to minimize greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, especially carbon dioxide emissions, relative to those technologies currently in use in a particular context (including, for example, renewable energy generation technologies, energy efficient end use technologies and more efficient fossil based energy generation technologies). The deployment of low carbon technologies is as much a priority for developed as for developing countries. But developing nations have attracted particular attention due to potential opportunities to industrialize on the basis of low carbon technologies as opposed to conventional ones. The unprecedented rate of industrialization and current and future increases in energy consumption of countries such as China and India highlights the significance of this opportunity to mitigate future GHG emissions. China and India's share of global CO₂ emissions, for example, grew from 13 per cent in 1990 to 26 per cent in 2007 (EIA, 2010). But the issue is equally significant for smaller developing countries. The fact that many of these new technologies were traditionally owned by companies based in developed countries meant that the issue became characterized as one of ‘technology transfer’, reflecting the idea that technologies could be transferred from where they were owned to new country contexts. This characterization of developed—developing, North—South transfer is now outdated with many developing countries, particularly the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), having become leading manufacturers and developers of low carbon technologies (Brewer, 2008). Nevertheless, the term ‘technology transfer’ is still widely used within policy and development discussions, and captures the idea that there are many cases where internationally owned technologies can be beneficially brought to bear within different developing country contexts, with subsequent environmental, economic and human development benefits.

A tension might be assumed between the adoption of often more expensive low carbon technologies and the achievement of more immediate development concerns, including aggregate economic growth and other priorities, such as wider access to modern energy services to meet basic needs (e.g. heating, cooking and lighting), particularly for poor and marginalized people. But this tension may be artificial. Low carbon technologies have the potential to make a strong contribution to human as well as economic development aims. In many cases, rural energy access could be better met — from an economic, environmental and social perspective — by, for example, solar home systems that use combinations of solar photovoltaics, batteries to store energy and highly efficient light-emitting diode (LED) light bulbs. Solar hot water systems have been shown to be an excellent way of providing hot water in urban and rural developing country contexts (Rodrigues and Matajs, 2005; Mallett, 2009), and the provision of energy efficient cleaner burning cook stoves has potential to reduce reliance on scarce wood fuel resources and to reduce the health impacts of fumes from indoor wood burning for cooking and heat. The integration of low carbon technologies within a country's energy matrix can also reduce its reliance and exposure to energy imports. Together with the increase in the diversity of the energy matrix, this can also serve to increase energy security in the face of both future price fluctuations for fossil resources and, in the long term, reductions in fossil-fuel availability (Biswas et al., 2001; Renewables, 2004).

Moreover, access to technologies has been a key priority for developing countries as a way in which to spur innovation and, thus, economic development (traditionally correlated with levels of economic development) (UNCTAD, 2007; Maskus and Okediji, 2010). Developing countries’ access to new low carbon technologies and the knowledge that underpins them can therefore potentially benefit economic competitiveness. The transfer of low carbon technologies to developing countries thus stands to contribute to both mitigating future climate change and to sustainable economic and human development in these countries. It is also worth noting here that, while low carbon technologies for the purpose of climate change mitigation is the main focus of this book, the transfer of technologies of relevance to adaptation to climate change is of equal importance. Many commentators thus now prefer to refer to the transfer of ‘climate technologies’ as opposed to ‘low carbon technologies’, the former now tending to characterize international policy discussions on the issue.

In large part due to the historical responsibility of developed nations for current atmospheric GHG concentrations and the high per capita emissions of these countries, low carbon technology transfer has formed a high profile issue within international climate change negotiations. Developed nations, at the time of writing, have obligations under both the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol to facilitate the transfer of low carbon technologies to developing nations. The promise of access to new technologies is widely viewed as the carrot that brought developing nations on board with these multilateral environmental agreements. However, technology transfer is also widely viewed as one of the areas where these agreements have failed to deliver (Khor, 2008), creating difficult tensions and often bringing negotiations on a post-Kyoto climate change agreement to a standstill. Any post-Kyoto deal will have to directly address this issue and do so in such a way that it stands to deliver more effectively than previous policy efforts.

It is against this backdrop of the failure to deliver low carbon technology transfer to developing countries in practice and the significant environmental, economic and human development benefits that it can yield which this book seeks to contribute. Most importantly, the book engages with the lack of empirical analysis that has been available to support policy efforts in this area. Political rhetoric on the issue often takes on a life of its own, reflecting more the idea of ‘received wisdom’(Leach and Mearns, 1996) than careful analysis based on empirical evidence. This has, for example, led to a failure to acknowledge insights from the field of innovation studies that emphasize the importance of the knowledge, or software, component of technology as opposed to simply the hardware — an issue attended to further below and by several of the contributors to this book (see, for example, Chapters 2, 4, 6 and 7 to 10).

A key concern, therefore, is that policy rhetoric on low carbon technology often fails to reflect the reality of how technology transfer can be achieved, not least in ways that will yield maximum development benefits for developing countries. This edited collection brings together leading contemporary thinkers on low carbon technology transfer to provide new empirical evidence, theoretical advancements and policy recommendations in one place for the first time, providing an overview of some of the key issues and emerging thinking in this field in an accessible policy relevant way. The book is targeted at policy makers, practitioners, researchers and students, and includes contributions from the research and practitioner communities in both developed and developing countries.

Several fundamental objectives have underpinned the development of this book. The first objective is to provide evidence based on ‘real world’ examples; the second is to revisit the theoretical underpinnings through which policy decisions are made; the third is to provide examples of ways to move policy forward in constructive new directions. We (the editors) have tried as much as possible to take a light touch when editing chapters and allow authors space for their own voices, views, opinions and interpretations of empirical evidence. Low carbon technology transfer is very much an emerging field with much scope for varying and contrasting views on theory and practice.We hope that readers will consult individual chapters for insights into the informed views of the various contributors and begin to develop their own empirically informed views as a result.

As a backdrop to this edited collection, in this introductory chapter we seek to introduce some of the issues that we see as critical in this emerging field and how they link to the different chapters of the book. These can be characterized around four key issues — namely:

• Low carbon technology transfer is unique from conventional technology transfer.
• Drawing on the innovation studies literature, innovation capacities can be understood to be what supports sustained uptake of new technologies, and these are developed via access to qualitatively different strands of knowledge, as opposed to simply the hardware component of technology. Innovation capacities also encompass recognition of the importance of adaptive and incremental innovation in the context of developing countries.
• Drawing on the socio-technical transitions literature, the socio-technical nature of technological transitions and the way that technologies and society co-evolve and shape one another can be identified as fundamental to understanding how low carbon development might be catalysed.
• Building on insights from the innovation studies and socio-technical transitions literatures, the context-specific, spatially situated technology needs of different people in different spaces (physical, cultural, economic and so on) can be understood to play a critical role in defining both what technologies are appropriate and how likely they are to be successfully adopted.

The coverage in this chapter is, however, by no means intended to be exhaustive and readers are urged to consult the individual chapters of this book for further insights on priority contemporary concerns in this field. The text below draws on our experience in researching technology transfer, as well as our interactions with the pioneering unconventional approaches to low carbon technology transfer of many of the academic and policy thinkers whom we have interacted with over the years — many of whom are represented in this book — and combines these insights with promising strands of contemporary research on climate change, energy and development. A range of chapters in this book adopt some or all of these analytical components. In the text below we provide a brief overview of each, referring readers, where relevant, to chapters that deal with them in more detail.We conclude the chapter by providing an outline of the structure of the book and an overview of the content of the individual chapters therein.

Why is low carbon technology transfer unique?

Technology transfer from one country to another has long been a subject of interest for scholars from a number of disciplines — for example, economic geographers analysing spatial configurations of various industries and their value chains, innovation studies scholars interested in technological development within different industries and firms, and development studies scholars interested in the introduction of technological innovations in developing countries to benefit poor and marginalized people. These efforts have yielded many insights of relevance to low carbon technology transfer. However, there are several unique characteristics of low carbon technologies that mean these insights need to be revisited and often demand new theoretical stances and empirical analysis.

The first point to consider is the fact that low carbon technologies are of interest due to an urgent global problem to which they form a part of the potential solution — namely, the problem of climate change. This immediately introduces a temporal concern in the form of urgency. So rather than being interested in the transfer of technologies that naturally occur via market processes over unspecified timescales, in this case we are interested in the transfer and uptake of technologies within a timescale that is fast enough to mitigate or adapt to future climate change impacts.

Secondly, policy aimed at facilitating transfer of low carbon technologies is essentially attempting an intervention to speed up a process that might or might not be delivered by the market, but is doing so for the purposes of delivering a global public good (i.e. climate change mitigation or adaptation) (Mowery et al., 2010). This implies a need to intervene to create conditions that incentivize transfer in the absence of an obvious market.

Thirdly, low carbon technology transfer is further problematized by the fact that many of these technologies are at pre-commercial stages in their development. Policy is therefore not simply concerned with their ‘horizontal’ transfer from one country context to another, but also their ‘vertical’ transfer from early research and development (R&D) stages through demonstration, early pre-commercial deployment, to commercially viable stages of development. This introduces a whole range of additional considerations, such as how to overcome high levels of investor risk for technologies at early stages of development, or how to adapt technologies to new contexts — whether economic, environmental or socio-technical (see below for discussion of the relevance of context specific considerations).

Hence, there are several reasons why low carbon technology transfer demands a reappraisal of the relevance of existing insights on technology transfer. There is a need to revisit and reinterpret existing theory and empirical evidence and to carry out new analysis targeted directly at understanding the considerations that characterize low carbon technology transfer. One particularly useful theoretical stance stems from the innovation studies literature on innovation capacities to which we now turn.

Innovation capacities: Distinguishing between technology hardware and types of knowledge

Low carbon technologies have a key role to play in boosting economic growth and productivity more generally in developing countries due to the important link between technology ownership, technological capacities (more correctly articulated as ‘innovation capacities’ — see below) and economic growth. A North—South gap historically characterizes technology ownership (Missbach, 1999) with developed countries having a clear technological advantage. As stressed by UNCTAD (2007), the key to sustained economic growth and poverty reduction in developing countries is increased productive capacities, a core part of which relies on technological progress. So ‘unless the LDCs [least developed countries] adopt policies to stimulate technological catch-up with the rest of the world, they will continue to fall behind other countries technologically and face deepening marginalization in the global economy’ (UNCTAD, 2007, pI). This is not to say that developing countries would or should necessarily become technology l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Low-Carbon Technology Transfer
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Part I New Analytic Approaches
• Part II Learning from Technology and Country-Specific Analysis
• Part III Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs)
• Part IV Assessing Existing International Policy Mechanisms
• Part V Low-carbon Technology Transfer and Poverty Alleviation
• Part VI Low-Carbon Technology Transfer in the Context of Other Global Concerns
• Part VII Moving Forward: New Directions for Policy and Practice
• Index