The two-year interdisciplinary research project “Diffusion of Clean Energy Technology for the Green Economy in Developing Countries” has recently ended and its final report is now available. Funded by the Swiss Network for International Studies (SNIS), this project was led by Liliana Andonova, Professor of International Relations/Political Science at the Institute and Co-Director of the Centre for International Environmental Studies (CIES), and Dr Joëlle Noailly, Head of Research at the CIES, in collaboration with the University of Bern, ETH Zurich, Harvard University and the United Nations Environment Programme.
Innovation and diffusion of clean energy technology is essential for moving toward a green economy in a carbon-constrained world. While the developed world is trying to transition to a more carbon-neutral energy mix, developing countries are struggling to secure sufficient energy to meet basic human needs.
The objective of “Diffusion of Clean Energy Technology for the Green Economy in Developing Countries” was to provide an indepth investigation of the determinants of the diffusion of clean energy technologies to developing countries. The project relied on conceptual methods from both the economic (e.g international technology diffusion and trade literature) and political science literature (e.g studies on energy governance, regime complexity, effectiveness and social learning) and contributed to new empirical insights.
Although the research project investigated different barriers to clean energy diffusion and different kinds of technologies (efficient lightings, clean cookstoves, renewable energy among which geothermal in particular), the collective contribution of the project highlights the critical importance of domestic policies and policy learning enabled by clean energy governance, openness to trade and imports of new technologies, and social diffusion and peer-group effects to diffuse information among consumers.
Excerpt from the final report: “Along our analysis, many of our hypotheses regarding the determinants of international diffusion originally formulated for the project have been confirmed. Our empirical results confirmed in particular that the diffusion of low-cost energy technology to developing countries does not take place automatically and faces instead specific barriers, in particular market failures (e.g. lack of environmental regulation, information inefficiencies), institutional factors (e.g. weak institutions), and economic barriers (trade, tariff barriers). Also, our expectations regarding the important impact of climate and clean energy policies on the greater diffusion of clean energy technologies, all else equal, have been confirmed. Finally, our results corroborate the expected impact of the clean energy regime, namely the greater the interactions between transnational clean energy initiatives and national policies, the more likely the diffusion of clean energy technologies.”