Foreign assistance and low carbon economies
This project was led by Professor Timmons Roberts who spent his sabbatical year with ECI as a Oxford Martin School Fellow from July 06-07.
The globalization of economic production and trade is causing many industrializing nations to become heavily reliant upon earnings from carbon intensive export products. These include oil and mineral extraction, petroleum-based input-intensive agriculture, and manufactures whose components require energy-intensive transport and processing. Many of our best climate policy tools—including carbon trading, public-private partnerships, and technology transfer to increase the efficiency of power plants and factories—may have only marginal effects given this seismic global shift.
Can foreign aid help drive positive change at the level of national economies, moving countries toward lower-carbon/higher value pathways of development? Utilizing the world’s largest database of foreign aid projects (PLAID), this project has two lines of research. First, current projects addressing climate change and energy efficiency are assessed for their likely impacts on emissions, given the nation’s shifting position in the global economy. Second, a retrospective analysis examines the impacts from transferring of trillions of euros over the last three decades on the exports and carbon emissions of developing nations. A just transition to lower carbon pathways requires compensation and assistance to address the needs of workers and domestic elites who have built their livelihoods on the basis of old, inefficient, or carbon-intensive technologies.
Selected Publications
- A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North South Politics, and Climate Policy (MIT Press, 2007, Timmons Roberts with Bradley Parks)
- Greening Aid? Understanding Environmental Assistance to Developing Countries (Robert Hicks, Bradley Parks, Timmons Roberts and Michael Tierney; scheduled publication 2007)