Climate Change, Sustainable Development, Cleantech envisions both global cleantech development and international cleantech transfer as crucial means to address climate change and secure sustainable development for planet earth. The book examines what it takes to attract foreign cleantech and encourage domestic cleantech innovation. The author proposes a pathway for developing countries that includes international aid, mutually beneficial international cleantech cooperation and domestic cleantech innovation.

Cleantech, technology capable of mitigating or adapting to climate change, is critical for a country to address climate change and build sustainable development effectively. Since the 1970s, the global community has emphasized the voluntary transfer of cleantech from developed countries to developing countries, since the former owns the majority of the existing cleantech and the latter needs cleantech. This focus has produced limited results. This article proposes we shift our focus to global cleantech development and deployment (including international cleantech transfer) instead.This article proposes a pathway for developing countries, especially the least developed countries, to attract foreign cleantech and develop domestic cleantech. The pathway includes three phases: international aid, international cleantech cooperation, and domestic cleantech innovation. This article suggests that the global community support developing countries in the establishment of their own cleantech innovation systems. Such purposeful support may come in the forms of international aid and mutually beneficial international cleantech cooperation. International aid helps countries, e.g., the least developed countries, to build domestic capacities for cleantech innovation and cleantech importation. Mutually beneficial international cleantech cooperation enables developing countries that have acquired such capacities to move further along toward domestic cleantech innovation. For domestic cleantech innovation, this article suggests that, in principle, a developing country should send clear policy signals to its private sector to indicate the government's long-term commitment to cleantech innovation. This article further proposes that the developing countries leverage diverse innovation tools, including customized intellectual property right (IPR) regimes and non-IPR tools such as prizes and innovation commons.

From the low of 2009, and the so-called ‘death’ of cleantech, five years have seen a steady resurgence of climate innovation - or 'cleantech 2.0' - as governments and organisations around the world increasingly pursue the sustainability agenda. Climate-KIC believes that entrepreneurs and innovators hold the key to responding to the climate challenge.

Technological revolutions have increased the world’s wealth unevenly and in ways that have accelerated climate change. This report argues that achieving The Paris Agreement’s objectives would require a massive transfer of existing and commercially proven low-carbon technologies (LCT) from high-income to developing countries where the bulk of future emissions is expected to occur. This mass deployment is not only a necessity but also an opportunity: Policies to deploy LCT can help countries achieve economic and other development objectives, like improving human health, in addition to reducing greenhouse gases (GHGs). Additionally, LCT deployment offers an opportunity for countries with sufficient capabilities to benefit from participation in global value chains and produce and export LCTs. Finally, the report calls for a greater international involvement in supporting the poorest countries, which have the least access to LCT and finance and the most underdeveloped physical, technological, and institutional capabilities that are essential to benefit from technology.

An examination of clean technology entrepreneurship finds that “green capitalism” is more capitalist than green. Entrepreneurs and investors in the green economy have encouraged a vision of addressing climate change with new technologies. In Planetary Improvement, Jesse Goldstein examines the cleantech entrepreneurial community in order to understand the limitations of environmental transformation within a capitalist system. Reporting on a series of investment pitches by cleantech entrepreneurs in New York City, Goldstein describes investor-friendly visions of incremental improvements to the industrial status quo that are hardly transformational. He explores a new “green spirit of capitalism,” a discourse of planetary improvement, that aims to “save the planet” by looking for “non-disruptive disruptions,” technologies that deliver “solutions” without changing much of what causes the underlying problems in the first place. Goldstein charts the rise of business environmentalism over the last half of the twentieth century and examines cleantech's unspoken assumptions of continuing cheap and abundant energy. Recounting the sometimes conflicting motivations of cleantech entrepreneurs and investors, he argues that the cleantech innovation ecosystem and its Schumpetarian dynamic of creative destruction are built around attempts to control creativity by demanding that transformational aspirations give way to short-term financial concerns. As a result, capitalist imperatives capture and stifle visions of sociotechnical possibility and transformation. Finally, he calls for a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism, in which sociotechnical experimentation is able to break free from the narrow bonds and relative privilege of cleantech entrepreneurs and the investors that control their fate.

Just a decade ago, China maintained only a handful of operating wind turbines -- all imported from Europe and the United States.

As diplomats and climate change negotiators discussed patents as a barrier to international transfer of clean technologies in December 2009 in Copenhagen, California solar thermal startup eSolar was finalizing a deal to build at least 2 gigawatts of solar thermal power plants in China. At the time the largest solar thermal deal ever, it was structured as a master licensing agreement with Chinese electrical power equipment manufacturer Penglai Electric. The eSolar-Penglai deal is just one of many recent partnerships, joint ventures, and licensing arrangements between clean technology firms in developed countries and investors, developers, utilities and builders in developing countries. Despite the reality on the ground, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (“UNFCCC”) and the developing country parties to the UNFCCC treaty have put forth a host of policy proposals to weaken or even eliminate IP rights in clean technologies. This article seeks to provide a clean tech reality check by highlighting nine significant clean technology transfers between developed countries and developing countries in the one-year period leading up to the Copenhagen talks. This article observes that IP rights were not a barrier to any of these deals and may have helped facilitate the technology transfer by providing exclusivity in the developing country market.