Enhancing Developing Country Access to Eco-Innovation

The deployment of eco-innovations in developing countries is a key driver of their contribution to efficiently addressing global environmental challenges. It is also a key driver of markets for eco-innovation and sustainable economic development. This report explores the barriers developing countries face in accessing markets for eco-innovation. It outlines the key considerations policy needs to address to overcome these barriers and discusses the extent to which selected existing policy mechanisms and organisation have achieved this. The key finding of the report is that the majority of existing policy mechanisms fails to recognise the critical importance of developing indigenous eco-innovation capabilities amongst developing country firms. Indigenous eco-innovation capabilities are essential to facilitating both the diffusion of existing ecoinnovations within developing countries and sustainable economic development based on the adoption, adaption and development of environmentally sound technologies that fit with the bespoke conditions faced by developing countries. Building up eco-innovation capabilities in developing countries requires a shift away from the current focus on large project based approaches which emphasise the transfer of the hardware aspects of clean technologies, towards approaches that emphasise flows of codified knowledge (know-how and know-why) and tacit knowledge. Policy also needs to be improved to better respond to the context-specific technological and cultural requirements which vary inter- and intra-nationally.