Abstract
The strong focus in climate negotiations on the transfer and diffusion of technologies as a means to mitigate and adapt to climate change has entailed various programs to promote the transfer and diffusion of climate technologies, including the Technology Needs Assessment project (TNA). Despite the technology focus in the project, practice shows that the questions of what a technology is and how the key concepts of technology transfer and diffusion should be understood and operationalized remain diffuse. This paper explores the reasons for this by analysing the experience of the TNA project in using a framework for categorizing technologies according to the types of markets and non-markets in which they are diffused. While the framework has contributed to a higher degree of ‘market literacy’ among national stakeholders, four challenges in categorizing technologies have been identified: i) technologies comprising varying degrees of software, orgware and hardware; ii) technologies appearing as whole systems of production; iii) technologies covering different application markets; and iv) technologies situated on a continuum between research, development and diffusion. These challenges are proxies for the challenges in formulating plans of actions for technologies. If, due to a lack of conceptual clarity, it is not clear to countries whether the diffusion of a specific technology should be implemented by a project or by means of an enabling framework, the measures proposed in the action plans may be misleading. We therefore call for an increased focus on clarifying the technology concept in the training for the next generation of TNAs.
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Notes
The TNA project is being funded by the Global Environmental Facility and executed by UNEP in 36 countries globally. It is a government-led project, actively involving stakeholders at different levels and in different sectors, to elaborate plans of action for the transfer and diffusion of selected technologies. More information is available at www.tech-action.org.
This framework is described in the ‘barrier handbook’, (Boldt et al. 2012), which was developed in parallel with and as a supplement to the ‘TNA handbook’ (UNDP 2010). The TNA handbook operates with four categories of technologies, i) Small-scale application, with a short-term market availability, ii) Small-scale application, with a medium to long-term market availability, iii) Large-scale application, with a short-term market availability, iv) Large-scale application, with a medium to long-term market availability. The handbook further includes a fifth category of non-market or ‘soft-technologies’.
The 11 countries included in the assessment comprise Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Rwanda, Mauritius, Zambia, Morocco, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Senegal and Lebanon.
It should be noted that although this paper is based on the barrier approach, we recognise that there are theoretical problems associated with this approach as discussed in Shove (1998). This discussion however is wider and outside the scope of this paper.
Earlier versions of the guidebook used the notion of public goods, which in the economic literature has a specific meaning different from the definition here. In the final versions of the guidebook, this is changed to publically provided goods. This is why, in many of the barrier analysis reports the notion of public goods is still used.
The reports analysed are all available on the project webpage for the TNA project at http://www.tech-action.org/TNAReports.asp
Programmes may consist of a series of projects implementing a technology, but ideally they should include various components (an enabling framework) to facilitate the better diffusion of technology under market conditions. It should be noted that support to establishing an enabling framework may be seen as a programme at the country level but characterised as a project by the donor supporting it, for example, the GEF.
Private companies account for around 70 % of total R&D expenditure in OECD countries (OECD 2008).
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Acknowledgments
We would like to express our gratitude to Jorge Rogat, Lars Christiansen and Gordon Mackenzie from URC and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments to a previous version of this paper
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This article is part of a Special Issue on “Governance, policy, and enabling frameworks for the transfer and diffusion of low carbon and climate resilient technologies in developing countries” edited by Subash Dhar, Ulrich Hansen, James Haselip, Daniel Puig, and Sara Trærup.
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Nygaard, I., Hansen, U.E. The conceptual and practical challenges to technology categorisation in the preparation of technology needs assessments. Climatic Change 131, 371–385 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1367-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-015-1367-5