Complexity of North-South Technology Transfer: Lessons from a renewable energy project in frontier markets

Beschrijving

Large-scale international transfer of clean technologies is widely seen as a crucial condition for reaching the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement goal. Many donor agencies are financing international collaboration projects aimed at renewable energy technology transfer, hoping that developing countries will leapfrog to these energy sources. However, many such projects exhibit implementation difficulties. In my seminar I will discuss one such project, financed by H2020 Europe Aid and executed in 2017-20. As the project’s coordinator I experienced the project’s ups and downs from up close from start to end - and beyond. The project aimed at building technological capacities in two universities in African developing countries in the field of electrical engineering and renewable energy services and was facilitated by the TU Eindhoven in partnership with a large humanitarian development NGO. I will engage in a reflection on my experiences that links to various academic debates. I suggest that many issues that we encountered in the project occur more widely in international aid projects. This makes it important to draw broader lessons about how to mitigate typical pitfalls in cleantech projects in developing countries, such as: cultural differences in the conduct of managerial processes, organizational misalignments between partners, and fuzziness of the concept of “local capacity building” in technology transfer projects. Last but not least, I will flag tensions arising from controversies over “development metrics”: the emphasis that the donor put on short-term quantitative targets and financial accountability and strategic window dressing by the project NGO-partner to meet the donor’s demands, versus a relentless focus on almost unmeasurable facilitative process management and development impacts by the TU Eindhoven staff.

Periode	27 sep. 2021
Gehouden op	Delft University of Technology, Nederland
Mate van erkenning	Internationaal