Mechanism Obstacles and Path Breakthroughs for International Low-Carbon Technology Sharing

Abstract

The deepening of global climate governance urgently needs to solve the institutional predicament between the monopoly and sharing of low-carbon technologies. In analyzing the institutional obstacles to the sharing of low-carbon technology, the study found significant asymmetric conflicts between developed and developing countries in technology supply, institutional rules, and market dynamics. The current international rule system (such as the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Bilateral Investment Agreement) has solidified the “central-periphery” pattern of technology distribution through tools such as “prohibition provisions on compliance requirements” and “green patent barriers”, resulting in developing countries facing dual pressures of “compliance costs” and “technology dependence”. In contrast, developed countries have fallen into the predicament of “innovation involution” due to the mismatch of technological application scenarios. Based on the theory of the technology life cycle and the perspective of subject complementarity, there is a structural mutual benefit space in the supply and demand of low-carbon technologies among different countries: developing countries can shorten the industrial decarbonization cycle through technology sharing, while developed countries rely on technology diffusion to digest excess capacity and consolidate their dominance in rules. By deconstructing the practical effectiveness of the low-carbon patent sharing platform and the defensive patent licensing model, it is highly feasible to reconstruct the technology sharing incentive framework with the “open-source mechanism”. Constructing a multi-level incentive mechanism to promote corporate participation, introducing dynamic defensive patent commitments, strengthening institutional capacity building, establishing a coordinated regulatory mechanism, and enhancing stakeholder compliance mechanisms are institutional optimization pathways. These provide a legal basis for harmonizing the exclusivity of intellectual property rights with the public nature of climate governance, and also offer strategic references for China’s participation in the formulation of global low-carbon technology regulations.

Keywords

Low-carbon technology / Technological monopoly / Technology sharing / Structural complementarity / Technology sharing platform

Ethics Statement

This study did not involve human or animal subjects, therefore ethical approval was not required.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable as the study did not involve human participants.

Data Availability Statement

No external datasets were used in this study. All data were derived from publicly available literature or author analysis.

Funding

This research received no external funding.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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