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organisations. Funding often provides the ability and focus for the academic to spend
valuable time, when the competing priorities of teaching and research also demand their
attention. Funding most commonly applies to cooperation in R&D, commercialisation
of licenses or patents or in entrepreneurship, through the creation of a start-up. Funding
has been documented as an incentive or driver to encourage academic entrepreneurial
activities. The lack of funding can constitute a formal institutional barrier that may
deter the intention of the academic to pursue the opportunity if the institution does
not provide the appropriate institutional structure to encourage entrepreneurial activity.
Marquardt et al.: Driving force or forced transition? The role of development
cooperation in promoting energy transitions in the Philippines and
Morocco [23]
Transition management has been developed as a particular analytical framework
for studying the link between niche level experiments and the regime level context in
transitions towards sustainability (and sustainable energy supply). The approach is based
on earlier transitions studies like strategic niche management, complex systems analysis,
or evolutionary theories and models. The empirical focus lies on OECD countries like
the Netherlands or Germany. On the one hand, transition management is used as an
analytical framework for renewable energy projects in developing countries. On the
other hand, the OECD-centric approach is confronted with empirical insights from
the developing world. Beyond that, in-depth empirical insights from Morocco and the
Philippines should enhance our understanding on the role of development cooperation
for promoting energy transitions in developing countries.
Addressing global threats like climate change, biodiversity loss or natural resources
exploitation requires deep-structural changes, or in other words, “transitions towards
sustainability”. Since the beginning of its development in 2001 transition management
has evolved as a framework for understanding these transitions and the complex
interactions between niche level interventions and system-wide change. Development
cooperation projects can be seen as a form of niche experimentation to foster transitions.
Although transition management has not received much attention in the field, this
approach can be a useful analytical framework for development cooperation.
Three crucial commonalities between transition management and development
cooperation should be highlighted:
1. Sustainable development goals: Transition management aims to capture all
dimensions of sustainability. This goal-oriented perspective represents also the
fundamental paradigmbehind current development cooperation and the United
Nations post-2015 development agenda (Sustainable Development Goals).
2. Focus on regime level change: Transition management defines a regime shift
as the overarching goal for any transition towards sustainability. Success or
failure of development cooperation can be assessed by its regime changing
effects, e.g. on a country’s electricity system. This broad perspective is similar
to discussions around impact evaluations for donor-driven activities.
3. Agents for change: Donors can be framed as agents that create protected
niches “in which new socio-technical configurations can grow and conditions