Reengineering the Climate Regime: Design and Process Principles of International Technology Cooperation for Climate Change Mitigation
DownloadInternational technology cooperation has recently gained attention as a promising component of the post-2012 climate regime that may improve political acceptability and long-term environmental effectiveness. International technology cooperation, however, may include countless policy parameters and unmanageable complexity. Considering the nature of technology cooperation, this paper proposes three principles for handling the complexity. First, nations should focus on research, development, and demonstration cost sharing, learning-investment sharing, technology and performance standards, and technology transfer, leaving other actions to a pledge and review scheme. Second, when technology cooperation is coupled with emissions trading, each should be institutionally independent, in order to limit complexity added by the combination. If they are integrated for political reasons, price caps and programmatic Clean Development Mechanism may serve as the interface that limits the extent of the added complexity. Finally, learning from bottom-up processes should be the guiding process principle for exploring an acceptable range of policy parameters.
Authors
Takahiro Ueno
