Building Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Industrialisation
There is a wealth of literature which has shown how access to electricity can create new business opportunities and increase economic activities in formerly nonelectrified communities (e.g., Peters and Sievert, 2016). This is not the focus of this book. Rather, it is focused overall on the contribution which renewable electrification can make in meeting sustainable industrialisation goals. Renewable electrification includes both the creation of access to electricity to formerly nonelectrified communities as well as transformation of existing energy systems with renewables. We argue that the debate about the benefits of renewable electrification needs a push. It must move beyond (a) the ability to create sustainable development benefits as a result of increased electricity access and (b) the ability to contribute to climate change mitigation. These are important goals in their own right, but there is a need to include (c) the local economic benefits that can potentially arise from the renewable electrification process itself. The debate needs to start focusing more heavily on questions about the localisation of economic activities and development of local capabilities for designing, constructing, and supplying renewable electrification infrastructure such as solar parks, windfarms, and hybrid grids. The concern should be not only with distribution of economic activities but also with the learning gains that may arise in connection with these activities. The economic activities involved in renewable electrification are temporal in nature, but the learning gains can have a more lasting effect on the change of economic development paths. Accordingly, we argue that building up capabilities for economic change – or innovation capabilities – constitutes an important missing link in ensuring the transition to a more sustainable development in developing economies. The book brings together new insights on the development of local capabilities and suggests policy measures that can support and accelerate the development of capabilities required for sustainable industrialisation in Kenya and countries facing challenges similar to those of Kenya. Such capabilities are vital for the transformation required at a time when the need for access to electricity for development in low and lower middle-income countries continues to increase while warnings against the potentially disastrous effects of continued high emissions of CO2 and the need to bring down CO2 emissions dominate international and domestic debates. The three main objectives of the book are therefore:
● To establish a new conceptual framework for analysing and understanding linkages between renewable electrification and sustainable industrialisation in developing economies.
● To contribute to the empirical understanding of how capabilities for sustainable industrialisation are being developed (or not) through renewable energy projects in low- and lower middle-income countries in Africa, based on indepth studies mainly, but not only, from Kenya.
● To contribute to the development of transformative innovation policies, i.e., policies that support green transition in a manner that also takes into consideration aspects of distribution and directions of development.
This introductory chapter creates a backdrop and then sets the scene for the book. First, we introduce key discourses and debates about sustainable industrialisation. Second, we focus on renewable electrification processes and challenges. We then bring these together and outline the key focus of the book by highlighting how renewable electrification may produce ‘co-benefits’ that may contribute to sustainable industrialisation processes. Finally, we outline the chapters and key themes of the book.
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