By Elisabeth Jeffries, REEEP Regional Secretariat for Latin America and the Caribbean
The unfortunately-named Doha round of trade talks appears jinxed. In July, the latest meetings in Geneva, aimed at creating more free trade between developing and developed economies, broke down. The EU said the US was too ambitious and not flexible in its agreements, while the US blamed protectionist pressures connected with the EU Common Agricultural Policy. Further meetings are planned, but the round appears to be going in circles.
Sadly, this is not the first example of its kind and history is littered with collapsed international agreements and summits whose action plans failed to deliver the visions expressed by campaigners. The Kyoto agreements themselves have often seemed jeopardised – so much so that politicians have sometimes shown a preference towards voluntary business-led initiatives.
Most notably this century, perhaps, the 2002 Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development was described by lobby groups and media as an abject failure because the final agreement was so weak. “Rather than Rio plus 10, the summit has set the agenda back so far that it could more accurately be termed Johannesburg minus 10. After a decade of broken promises, we are back to where we started,” wrote a grumpy Guardian commentator.
Local supply chains
But a few new threads were pulled out of the summit that are still being woven into a perhaps more progressive picture. One of them was the Global Village Energy Project (GVEP), a group which works on improving energy access in developing countries. To improve their standard of living, people in poor regions always depend upon sources of energy as well as other resources such as education to improve their income. But energy is a fundamental building block.
“GVEP is working with small enterprises at ground level to build energy access supply chains,” explains Sarah Adams, the organisation’s programme co-ordinator, “We reach out to smaller partners – they need the support and are not getting it from the [development] agencies because they are too small.” By acting in a relatively informal way and not depending on weighty political negotiations, it may be that this organisation is more nimble than some of the official public sector organisations involved in the same issues.
GVEP, which consists of 680 partners, describes itself as a “voluntary partnership that brings together developing and industrialised country governments, public and private organisations, multilateral institutions and consumers.” It works all over the world from Brazil to Sri Lanka to the Phillippines, developing action plans and building relationships between and among businesses, governmental organisations and NGOs.
Its creation came at the end of a long series of development mishaps. Knowing this, experts in the field had been working on alternative and more creative frameworks which still support international relationships and help economic development. Steve Rayner of the Said Business School of Oxford University, an expert in anthropology and Professor of Science and Civilisation has said that "private sector partnerships, local communities and regional and local authorities need to be encouraged to take direct action on a more localised basis. While diplomacy and legislation (the Type 1 approach) provide an important framework, Type 2 measures, which I and a number of colleagues have been advocating since the mid-1980s, are empowering, directly relevant to the individuals concerned and potentially more effective in actually changing behaviour."
He was referring to the types of organisation formed at Johannesburg of which GVEP is just one example. Type 2 organisations have a greater reach than bureaucracies but also benefit from official backing; they are defined by the United Nations as “voluntary, multi-stakeholder initiatives aimed at implementing sustainable development.” One of GVEP’s early roles was to act as a co-ordinator between different aid agencies.
Progress has been slow but steady. Energy had been unfortunately omitted from the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and one of GVEP’s tasks has been to put the energy access issue back onto the agenda and work at the problems on the ground, funded by grants, loans and other cash donated by partners. Prior to this, only various government agencies, ministries and regional or national NGOs had been involved in the issues. Since then, Adams argues there has been improved co-ordination: “GVEP has been leading the attempt to get energy back into the poverty reduction strategies, to receive budgets and to be recognised as an important part of development,” she says.
African NGOs, for instance, might thus be better assisted and perhaps more easily heard through this structure, when global issues are being discussed. Energy access is rarely a purely national affair nowadays. She contends that the partnership has succeeded in its agenda-setting goal and also enabled greater multi-sectoral work (for instance between government ministries of health and energy) through effective multi-sectorial committees that were previously lacking. It is an important task in a field which too often gets overlooked, because of the invisible nature of energy. Hence, the MDGs had focused on, for example, education, without considering the important underlying energy resource.
But energy development is a slow business and four years a short time. Nevertheless, GVEP’s work has been recognised through a US $30m donation aimed at work in sub-Saharan Africa announced this summer by the Russian government.
Training the trainers
China’s fast growing economy is consuming energy at such a rapid rate that it has to build a new power station every month. Under such conditions, and in an era when energy security is accepted as an economic risk, energy efficiency use has risen rapidly up the agenda. Hence China has built 11 energy performance standards into nine types of consumer products such as refrigerators, DVD players and televisions.
“These measures are estimated to save 85 TWh (terawatt hours) annually by their tenth year of implementation. By 2020, China's standards and labelling program is estimated to save 11% of its residential energy use, reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 34 million tons annually, and avoid the need for $20 billion investment in power plant construction,” states Christine Egan, director of CLASP, the Collaborative Labelling and Appliance Standards Programme, which has played a major role in developing the new Chinese policies. The partnership works across the world developing an international knowledge base and promoting best practice. “Research shows that standards and labels are the most effective way to promote energy efficiency,” she says, pointing out that the governments of some countries have failed to cut energy usage due to bad policies. “After several years of working on the problems, China is has now become so sophisticated and understands the problems well. We now have Chinese experts who themselves can become trainers in best practice.”
Technology transfer lies at the heart of CLASP’s work in China, integrating the last 20 years of experience and toolkits developed around the world. “Co-operation with a wide range of groups and training of our Chinese counterparts forms the basis of our success there,” explains Egan, who considers the China project to be the group’s biggest success and largest project in recent years. The training included 196 person-weeks for 90 officials from five agencies, split evenly between training in the USA and training inside China.
The partnership does not lobby developing country governments for new policies, but helps to implement them and provides technical analysis. Hence, it side-steps some of the political battles and works behind the scenes to develop awareness. Its role as an outsider may be of some help here, being one of only two international partnerships dedicated to energy efficiency, and the only one focused on standards and labels. As such, it performs a unique role that was previously unfulfilled by any international NGO.
Puncturing the myths
The approach is based on networking, information exchange and communication between experts that has only become possible in recent years due to the globalisation of trade and policy. That is also the fundamental philosophy behind GNESD (the Global Network on Energy for Sustainable Development headquartered in Denmark), another group that focuses on the expansion of energy expertise at a global level, and that was created at Johannesburg.
“There was a wish to pull together different types of goodwill and ambitions and lift the tone a bit,” remembers John Christensen, the GNESD director present at the summit which disappointed many. Perhaps this sums up the thinking behind global partnerships – an attempt to thread together best practice, common knowledge and business creativity across the world for the benefit of economic development.
For instance, the African knowledge network called AFREPREN has existed since the early 1990s, working on energy development in the Anglophone regions of the continent. But its connection with GNESD since 2002 has enabled it to tap into international expertise in other parts of the world and compare experiences with regions elsewhere. Christensen says his partnership is often labelled a “network of networks” but says this does not fully reflect its role.
The group has done more than connect people; it has shaped the views and definitions on good policy. “Although we bring networks together, we also help to digest all the information that’s become available during the analysis,” he says, pointing out that some countries still feel very isolated. Energy-related expertise exists at a macro level, but knowledge about the issues on a local level is poor. There is insufficient data on local issues. Hence, GNESD plays a role in feeding this back into the global wires and vice-versa. For instance, Christensen argues that the involvement of AFREPREN in Kenyan electrification was informed and helped by its GNESD connection. But perhaps the most important contribution the organisation has made in the last four years is to develop a better overview on the impact of power reforms in developing countries.
In the 1990s, a good deal of rhetoric existed about the virtue of privatisation. However, Christensen contends that one of GNESD’s achievements has been to puncture this myth and show that it does not help the poor get access. Similarly, the “religion” concerning renewable energy has also been broken down, while at the same time its value in certain niche situations has been proven. “The message has become more balanced,” he says.
Too often, the financial, legal and political worlds move separately and opportunities slip into the cracks. In South Africa, local banks and investors were unaware of some funding tools and opportunities available for investment in sustainable energy. A programme by the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) to bring executives into a tighter network came to a close there this year, helping to raise clean energy up the agenda. “Financiers weren’t aware of clean energy funding flows and didn’t know one another,” explains Glynn Morris, a regional REEEP co-ordinator. He says this is one of REEEP’s most successful projects in Africa, increasing the likelihood of new financial deals in the sector by identifying a core community of clean energy investors.
Like the other partnerships, REEEP works all over the world, providing grant funding for the development of business models and innovative forms of financing in order to remove investment barriers. It also assists governments on clean energy policy development and aims to transfer good policy from country to country. It is one of the more successful Type 2 partnerships, having in 2005 benefited from US$ 6.7 million in public sector funds from Western governments. Unlike the other partnerships, it works on finance and policy at the same time to weld them together more closely.
In Africa, REEEP has been working to establish a network of regulators similar to the network of financiers fostered in South Africa. The Sustainable Energy Regulation Network (SERN) is comprised of regulators from more than a dozen African nations, who work together to identify how best to foster renewable energy and energy access in their nations.
SERN’s purpose is to facilitate the creation of regulatory structures that encourage renewable energy. “Our aim is to promote better understanding of the economic benefits of renewable energy and energy efficiency – including reduced risk of fuel imports and opportunities for income generation, particularly in rural areas,” says SERN Project Director, Dr. Gill Owen of Warwick University. “On the one hand, we are trying to improve understanding of the technical issues related to the integration of renewable energy and energy efficiency into the power system. However, this also gives us the opportunity to encourage the incorporation of social and environmental objectives to achieve a balanced, sustainable energy system.”
REEEP, like GVEP and GNESD, was launched at WSSD in August 2002. Each was created to fill a particular need or to address a barrier in the market development of sustainable energy and energy efficiency. The UK government put forward the idea of REEEP as a tool to address market barriers identified by the G8 Renewable Energy Task Force and to create more favourable market conditions for clean energy.
With a few exceptions, the finance community in 2002 viewed renewables as an unattractive option, not “bankable” and too risky. Capital flows most easily to markets which combine low risk with high returns. Hence, many bankers had a blind spot in this area.
“REEEP will be different if it provides political muscle to processes that have all too often been enfeebled by financiers’ inability or refusal to see emerging energy markets for what they are – immature, but offering staggering potential in employment, trade, investment, environmental benefits and, surely of fundamental importance, human equity,” states Mike Allen, former Director of E&Co, and now REEEP’s Finance Advisor.
REEEP is designed as a public-private partnership in order to maximise the global impact of those who are willing to subscribe to this vision. “The convergence of political and financial interests and resources will give REEEP the combined focus necessary to support policy development. With the right policies in place, risk can be lowered and finance can be attracted into a particular market or region,” says Dr. Marianne Osterkorn international director of REEEP.
Type 2 energy partnerships are young, but seem to be finding a role in the global clean energy marketplace. At times this is a precarious spot located between the private sector, development banks, NGOs and the regions and communities who desperately require access to clean, affordable energy.
Many are now more visibly subject to global political decisions, as witnessed at the Gleneagles and St. Petersburg G8 summits where REEEP, for one, was singled out for its role as a “delivery mechanism for energy efficiency in buildings.” GVEP, in its turn, publicly benefited from the Russian Government’s recent St. Petersburg $30m commitment.
Other Type 2 energy partnerships exist, all working on the rigidities of international structures. Arguably, they will become more predominant as populations grow and new energy solutions and more effective policy are required. But radical NGOs have sometimes dismissed the partnerships, claiming that they are a diversion, side-stepping the need for binding international governmental commitments. “Misplaced emphasis on these Type 2 outcomes threaten to mask the failure of governments to agree on meaningful action and may result in the privatisation of sustainable development,” warned leading NGOs Greenpeace and Oxfam at the time of the Johannesburg summit. After only four years, it is still too early to judge whether they are right.
