It is increasingly being recognised that the development, adoption and diffusion of cleaner energy technologies are key determinants to success or failure in environmental policy, at least in the long term. However, it is still unclear what specific role there is for public policies and regulatory intervention in this field, and how to select an appropriate portfolio of policy action and instruments that does justice to all stages in the development cycle of technological change. The key objective of this paper is to provide an analytical framework for analysing and assessing the way in which public policy can promote environmentally benign technological change. The framework comprises a template that blends a mechanistic representation of causal variable-impact relationships with knowledge and insights from empirical research.
“It is widely agreed that technical innovation is the ultimate key to successful (meaning affordable as well as quantitatively adequate) global measures to stabilise the concentration of GHGs in the atmosphere” (Toman, 1998: 610)
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