EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The conceptual and practical challenges to technology categorisation in the preparation of technology needs assessments

Ivan Nygaard () and Ulrich Hansen

Climatic Change, 2015, vol. 131, issue 3, 385 pages

Abstract: The strong focus in climate negotiations on the transfer and diffusion of technologies as a means to mitigate and adapt to climate change has entailed various programs to promote the transfer and diffusion of climate technologies, including the Technology Needs Assessment project (TNA). Despite the technology focus in the project, practice shows that the questions of what a technology is and how the key concepts of technology transfer and diffusion should be understood and operationalized remain diffuse. This paper explores the reasons for this by analysing the experience of the TNA project in using a framework for categorizing technologies according to the types of markets and non-markets in which they are diffused. While the framework has contributed to a higher degree of ‘market literacy’ among national stakeholders, four challenges in categorizing technologies have been identified: i) technologies comprising varying degrees of software, orgware and hardware; ii) technologies appearing as whole systems of production; iii) technologies covering different application markets; and iv) technologies situated on a continuum between research, development and diffusion. These challenges are proxies for the challenges in formulating plans of actions for technologies. If, due to a lack of conceptual clarity, it is not clear to countries whether the diffusion of a specific technology should be implemented by a project or by means of an enabling framework, the measures proposed in the action plans may be misleading. We therefore call for an increased focus on clarifying the technology concept in the training for the next generation of TNAs. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-015-1367-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:131:y:2015:i:3:p:371-385

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-015-1367-5

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:climat:v:131:y:2015:i:3:p:371-385