Governing Clean Technology Diffusion Across Society: From Firm Innovation to Household Adoption

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel centers on a core environmental policy question: how do governments turn promising clean technology innovations into actual emissions reductions by driving diffusion? Clean technologies deliver their environmental benefits when they spread widely enough to change energy use, production, and consumption across the economy, so diffusion sits at the center of decarbonization rather than at the margins of innovation policy. Across public R&D, technical standards, firm capabilities, and administrative design for household adoption, the four papers show that clean technology diffusion is not simply a response to prices or consumer preferences. It is a problem of coordination: connecting knowledge to commercialization, aligning producers with regulatory demands, creating stable policy expectations, and making adoption feasible for households. Together, the panel offers a multi-level account of how public institutions shape who can innovate, who can comply, and who can participate in the low-carbon transition.

The first paper begins with public support for innovation in low-carbon transportation. It asks whether public R&D supported EV inventions become more influential, bridge separate technology domains, and draw a broader set of actors into innovation. It highlights government’s role not only in funding R&D, but also in helping clean-energy knowledge move from lab to practice.

The second paper examines how policy instability affects clean energy R&D. Using the case of wind turbine technology, the paper asks whether frequent policy change, retrenchment in particular, cause first to reallocate R&D between short-term and long-term applications. The panel next turns to the rules and capabilities that shape whether clean technologies can scale. The third paper brings the analysis inside the firm through India’s room air conditioner market. It shows that standards and labeling can drive major efficiency gains possible only when innovation capability upgrading across domestic firms and multinational subsidiaries.

The fourth paper then moves to the adoption consideration, where the climate benefits of clean technology depend on whether households can access and use it. It examines AI-enabled energy-efficiency rebates to show how public program design shapes the household diffusion of clean technologies. By shifting attention to the administrative systems attached to rebates, the paper highlights that adoption depends not only on technologies and incentives, but also on whether public programs are usable in practice.

Overall, the panel offers a clear answer to how to drive diffusion: emissions reductions depend not only on inventing clean technologies, but on standardizing them, building the capabilities to produce them, and designing programs that shift household usage. By connecting these stages in one conversation, this panel shows how environmental policy can move beyond isolated tools and toward governance strategies that make decarbonization possible on a larger scale.

Policy Area

• Natural Resource, Energy, and Environmental Policy

Chair

• David C. Popp, Syracuse University

Discussants

• Mallory E Flowers, University of Rhode Island

• Yifan Liu, Harvard University

Organizer

• Jingni Zhang, Syracuse University

Individual Presentations

• Who Drives EV Knowledge? Government Support, Spillovers, and Innovation Networks - Presenting Author: Jingni Zhang, Syracuse University

• Policy Volatility and the Temporal Orientation of Innovation - Presenting Author: Myriam Gregoire-Zawilski, University of Ottawa; Non-Presenting Co-Author: Xue Gao, Florida State University; Non-Presenting Co-Author: ZIYAO ZHU, Florida State University

• Building firm capabilities in the Global South for a low-carbon energy technology transition - Presenting Author: Anurag Panda, ETH Zurich

• Algorithmic Empowerment or Algorithmic Control? A Survey Experiment on AI in Energy Rebate Take-Up - Presenting Author: YU XIAO, Florida State University