The basic concept of Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is that both the developed and developing countries benefit from this mechanism. Contributing two objectives - sustainable development to developing countries, and emission reduction credit to developed countries - CDM is also expected to contribute to the developing countries’ national development goals. In addition, CDM has potential to support “technological leapfrogging” for the developing countries to bypass the inefficient technological choices those were adopted by the developed countries during their industrial period (Philbert, 2004). Hence beyond its primary objectives, CDM is considered as a Technology Transfer (TT) tool to boost technology transfer and diffusion between the developed and developing countries. However, with the recent trend of increase in CDM projects in developing countries there are increasing concerns on the geographic distribution of CDM projects (e.g. Nelwamondo 2008, Dechezlepretre et al. 2008), the benefits between the countries (Ellis et al. 2007), and the perceived lack of technology transfer and diffusion within the CDM (Nelwamondo 2008). This paper begins with description of the CDM as a TT tool with some contemporary scenarios in present CDM projects and analyses some factors affecting TT among different developing countries. Some issues as sustainability and distributive issues of the CDM projects are also dealt to find whether there are some gaps or limitations in present CDM scenario with respect to TT. Finally the paper tends to make some conclusions and recommendations for improving the technology performance of the CDM projects.
This study has used mainly the UNEP Risoe Center CDM Pipeline database and some literatures as the main information sources. Since searching data from the Project Design Documents (PDDs) would be time consuming, and also the required data for the analysis are already synthesized in some literatures as Coninck et al. 2007, Dechezlepretre et al. 2007 and Dechezlepretre et al. 2008; this study has relied on these data for analyzing CDM as a technology transfer tool. Furthermore, literatures are reviewed for the contemporary issues of CDM and factors affecting TT before coming to the conclusion.
