Technology Transfer in Clean Development Mechanism (CDM): A Survey

Abstract

The basic concept of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is that both the developed and developing countries benefit from this mechanism. Contributing two objectives; sustainable development to developing countries and emission reduction credit to developed countries, CDM is also expected to contribute to the developing countries’ national development goals. In addition, CDM has potential to support “technological leapfrogging” for the developing countries to bypass the inefficient technological choices, adopted by the developed countries during their industrial period (Philbert, 2004). Hence beyond its primary objectives, CDM is considered as a Technology Transfer (TT) tool to boost technology transfer and diffusion between the developed and developing countries. However, with the increase in the number of CDM projects in developing countries, there are increasing concerns on the geographic distribution of CDM projects (e.g. Nelwamondo 2008, Dechezlepretre et al. 2008) , the benefits between the countries (Ellis et al. 2007), and the perceived lack of technology transfer within the CDM (Nelwamondo 2008). This paper begins with description of the CDM as a TT tool with some contemporary scenarios in present CDM projects and analyses some factors affecting TT among different developing countries. Some issues as sustainability and distributive issues of the CDM projects are also dealt to find whether there are some gaps or limitations in present CDM scenario with respect to the technology transfer. Finally the paper tends to make some conclusions and recommendations for improving the technology performance of the CDM projects.

This study has used mainly the UNEP Risoe Center CDM Pipeline database and some literatures as the main information sources. Since searching data from the Project Design Documents (PDDs) would be time consuming, and also the required data for the analysis were already synthesized in some literatures as Coninck et al. 2007, Dechezlepretre et al. 2007 and Dechezlepretre et al. 2008; the analyzed data are used for the study of the section – CDM as a technology transfer tool. For the sections – factors affecting technology transfer and emerging concept in CDM, literature review was conducted to arrive to the conclusion.