The importance of clean and environmentally sound technologies in addressing pressing environmental challenges such as climate change cannot be overemphasized. While much of the attention has been on the obligations of the public sector to provide a suitable environment for clean technology transfer, there are practical legal barriers that also hinder the private sector from deploying clean technologies. In practice, it is not only the public sector that will influence climate change and other environmental challenges, the private sector will equally play a critical role in promoting clean technology transfer. This policy brief examines policy and legal implications of transferring clean technologies from industrialized and technologically advanced states (the “North”) to developing, least-developed and technologically impoverished states (the “South”).
