Directing clean development mechanism towards developing countries' sustainable development priorities

Abstract

Under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), sustainable development is considered a country context-specific aspect which differs across countries. Actual CDM practice has shown that projects are largely initiated by the demand for relatively low-cost certified emission reductions, leading to a series of ad-hoc projects, rather than serving the overall host countries' sustainable development needs and priorities. In the above framework, the study aims to direct CDM towards national sustainable development priorities, through the identification of sustainable energy technology priorities for electricity generation in five examined developing countries, namely Chile, China, Israel, Kenya and Thailand. The current approach lays emphasis on the formulation of the process so as to be relatively straightforward to incorporate direct experts' preferences as well as trying to deal with the needs of flexibility and validity, through the use of an existing Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) method, namely the Electre TRI method.