Enabling Japan’s Low Emissions Technology Collaboration with Southeast Asia: The Role of Co-innovation and Co-benefits

In Aligning Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies in Asia
Chapter: 10
Book Chapter
Enabling Japan’s Low Emissions Technology Collaboration with Southeast Asia: The Role of Co-innovation and Co-benefits

The widespread adoption of low emissions technologies in rapidly developing countries is critical to resolving the climate emergency.1 However, many fast growing economies lack the energy efficient, renewable, and other advanced technologies needed to mitigate climate change. Technology transfer could help address these countries need. Yet the “affordability,” “adaptability,” and a host of other “market concerns” present significant barriers to low emissions technology transfer. To a considerable extent, these barriers arise from overly linear perspectives on technology transfer. These perspectives envisage technology hardware as moving one way from developed supplier countries to developing recipient countries. While this linear view arguably oversimplifies a complex reality, it suggests several sticking points frustrating the transfer of technology: namely, much of the discussion around the technology transfer process and its outcomes pay insufficient attention to the potential of benefits of new technologies in developing countries. This chapter places that process and its potentially beneficial outcomes front and center. It argues that the key to unlocking the potential of technology transfer is to work toward a co-innovation process.

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