Effectiveness of aid projects in climate technology familiarization in recipient countries

ABSTRACT

Due to inequalities of innovation capacity among nations, climate technologies’ minimizing greenhouse gas emissions require deliberate interventions for adoption and diffusion in developing countries. Aid projects of international development organizations have long served the function of system builders for climate technologies through demonstration projects or barrier removal activities. Emerging transition literature has come up with theories of how project-level niche experiments gradually affect landscape settings through bottom-up evolution. The activities of the aid projects on climate technologies match the posited roles of niche experiments nurturing with the co-evolution of technology, user practices and regulatory structures. This paper provides insight into how climate technologies, previously supported by aid projects, played a role in familiarizing these technologies in recipient countries. Familiarization in this paper is defined as the non-prioritization of climate technology in a country’s Technology Needs Assessment (TNA) document. It was found that increasing project duration lowers the chance of technology’s inclusion in TNA, while higher project cost increased the odds of inclusion. Given the time-consuming nature of capacity building over multiple fronts, the effectiveness of future projects depends on donors’ ability to commit aid over multiyear periods to sustain scale-up.

KEYWORDS:

• Renewable energy
• aid projects
• strategic niche management
• technology needs assessment (TNA)
• project duration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 https://tech-action.unepdtu.org/tna-database/.

2 http://docs.aiddata.org/ad4/files/aiddata_coding_scheme_0.pdf.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nabil Haque

Nabil Haque completed his PhD in Technology, Policy and Innovation (TPI) from Stony Brook University. His dissertation focused on climate technology transfers to developing countries, and the role of multilateral and bilateral agencies in facilitating the process. Previously he worked as an environmental advisor for GIZ in Bangladesh. He has a bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and master's degree in Environmental Resource Policy from the George Washington University.

Sungida Rashid

Sungida Rashid received her Ph.D. in Economics specializing in Financial Economics and International Trade from the Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 2019. Her empirical dissertation focused on financially constrained manufacturing firms in emerging economics. Previously she worked as an instructor of economics at Clarion University and Southern Illinois University. She received her undergraduate degrees as well as her master's degree in Statistics from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh.