Climate action through ‘transformative technologies’: how shaping a future society?

For many years, governments and civil society groups in the global South have been demanding that their countries should have easier, low-cost access to green technologies.  These are meant to bring several environmental benefits including reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions.  Responding to such demands, COP27 extended the Technology Mechanism of the UN Climate Convention. 

Although this may sound like a specialist matter, the specific forms have been politically contentious.  Technological priorities can shape ‘climate solutions’ and thus control over resources. What choices are at stake?  Who will be empowered to shape them?  These questions are my focus here; sources have hyperlinks for readers who would like more information.  The UN programme, ‘Accelerating Climate Action through Technology Development and Transfer’, dates from the 2015 Paris climate agreement with its concept of ‘transformative technology’.  Encompassing activities during 2023-2027, the new programme aims to ‘unlock appropriate climate technologies everywhere in the world’, mainly to benefit developing countries.  According to U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, the programme will provide ‘smart technology solutions for climate resilience and mitigation’. 

Those buzzwords warrant some scrutiny.  The verb ‘unlock’ implies that the relevant technologies already exist but must be freed from some external constraint, such as a financial or regulatory barrier.  The adjective ‘smart’ implies that a device embodies an intelligence that can substitute for human operators.  Even more contentious, the phrase ‘technology transfer’ has denoted capital-intensive innovations displacing or marginalising the expertise of the recipient country or locality.  Indeed, for several decades, such ‘transfer’ has been criticised for extending and disguising the North’s neocolonial domination.

Such controversy has led UN bodies to incorporate more inclusive language.  Hence ‘climate-resilient development’ depends on ‘developing partnerships with traditionally marginalised groups, including women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, local communities and ethnic minorities’, says the full programme.  Although helpful, this proviso cannot guarantee their role in agenda-setting. To understand the tensions, let us look at rival agendas for ‘climate-smart agriculture’. 

The concept was floated at the 2011 Durban Climate Summit (COP 17).  As presumed benefits, climate-smart agriculture would make crops less vulnerable to heat and drought, while turning depleted soils into carbon sinks.  The storage would generate carbon credits, whose sale would help finance small-scale farmers.  Yet such socio-economic and environmental benefits elicited doubts from many experts such as Edward Pearce.

The stakes were raised at the 2014 and 2015 UN climate summits, where policy elites promoted the Global Alliance for Climate-Smart Agriculture (GACSA).  This addressed the pervasive problem that weed-clearing via soil tillage degrades the structures necessary for soil health and fertility, while also releasing GHG emissions. As a no-till remedy, multinational corporations were promoting their synthetic fertilizers and herbicides with GM herbicide-tolerant crops.  Moreover, by storing carbon,  the carbon sinks (areas which accumulate and store carbon) would make the land eligible for carbon credits, sell carbon offsets in the global North, and thus provide financial incentives in the global South. 

This agenda has epitomized the neocolonial meaning of ‘technology transfer’, inducing dependence on capital-intensive inputs.  GACSA’s agenda was widely denounced as a ‘false solution’ and ‘corporate-smart greenwash’ on several grounds: social, climate and wider environmental.  Civil society networks (www.climatesmartagconcerns.info) warned against such ‘industrial approaches that drive deforestation, increase synthetic fertiliser use, intensify livestock production or increase the vulnerability of farmers’.  They warned about unequal power relations, whereby ‘the agendas of corporations and wealthy governments are given greater weight than those of civil society organisations, small-scale farmers and developing countries’.  

Those networks counterposed farmers’ traditional skills for agroecological methods. Through knowledge exchange, they were learning how to minimise soil tillage through non-chemical forms of weed management.  More ambitiously, such methods were ‘feeding the people and cooling the planet’.  By 2021 an agroecology-based ‘climate-smart agriculture’ was being promoted by global networks of small-scale peasants and indigenous people, such as the Rainforest Alliance.  Nevertheless  the World Bank has continued an agenda similar to the original GACSA one of policy elites. 

Thus controversy continues over the social meaning of climate-smart or climate-resilient agriculture.   This brief example illustrates rival technical solutions for the same climate problem.  They entail rival versions of the problem, justifying either farmers’ knowledge-exchange or else capital-intensive inputs as ‘technology transfer’.   

The rival solutions also relate to the increasingly popular slogan, ‘System Change, not Climate Change’.  This attributes climate change to the dominant industrial and market system, which therefore must be transformed.  Indeed, the UN programme promotes ‘transformative technology’.  Designed by and empowering whom?  As this article has shown, those policy concepts encompass rival social actors, means and directions for a low-carbon future.

This opinion piece was been written by Les Levidow, Senior Research Fellow (Faculty of Art and Social Sciences) at The Open University, in November 2022 as a response to a call for articles from our OU colleagues, that relate to climate change from their own disciplinary or lived experience.

Background note:

This article draws on the author’s forthcoming book:   Les Levidow,  Beyond Climate Fixes: From Public Controversy to System Change, https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/beyond-climate-fixes