Determinants on the performance of sustainable innovation projects and the role of public policies

Abstract

Academics and policy makers, alike, have been grappling with how to devise effective strategic for international coordination of climate change policies. The sheer complexity of the climate change problem-which implicates a myriad of national policies and actors-is daunting. In recent years diplomatic efforts have focused on a variety of flexible "bottom up" schemes-a shift that will be on display later this year in Paris. And academics, as well, have identified ways that these strategies, which decompose the daunting global problem of climate change into more tractable smaller units, can lead to tangible improvements in governance. We focus on the case of deforestation, as the alteration of a nation's internal land use policies is one of the greatest challenges; success could have a very large impact on emissions of warming gases. Fortuitously, there have been many different efforts to address deforestation; our study will focus on how those diverse efforts have been organized and whether (and how) lessons about success and failure are being learned. We will focus on a cluster of experiments in Brazil and Indonesia-two countries that have had large deforestation and are also major recipients of foreign aid targeted to deforestation. And we will focus on three different donors - Norway, Germany and the US. Treating each of these donor-recipient relationships as a distinct case, we will apply concepts drawn from the theory of experimentalist governance. In effect, each of these four macro cases is a unique experiment, offering high variation across the factors that, we think, will explain success and failure. The case studies will focus on factors such as the motivation for donors and recipients to work together, the criteria used by donors to select partners, the agencies internal to the country implementing the aid program, the setting of provisional goals, systems for monitoring and assessment, and transfer of knowledge (learning) across cases and countries. The experimentation and documentation of these experiments will lead to practical insights into how these donors and recipients are solving (or not) highly complex problems of policy coordination through the engagement of governments and civil society actors. (AU)