Leapfrogging Possibilities For Sustainable Consumption and ...

Resource rich countries that boast high level of total GDP have a significant number of
their people suffering from poverty due to the fact that their economies haven’t created
enough number of jobs at the local community level.
6.2.7 Lock-in
One of the important reasons behind the delays of shifting to hydrogen economy and
other economies which are more sustainable than the current fossil based economy is the
challenges of lock-in. Each type of economy requires its own institutional, infrastructural,
financial and social as well as legal supports that in the first place establish it and later
operate it. Each type of economy is also characterized by a certain set of technologies.
Once such structural and institutional supports are well developed around the set of
technologies to which they are created only incremental changes and improvements
becomes viable, not a transformational change of leapfrogging. That is why at higher or
at the systems level there is this problem of lock-in around a specific set of dominant
technologies and a set of corresponding surrounding support systems.
6.2.8 Rebound effect
This phenomenon describes a situation where a gain in improved energy and material use
efficiencies is counteracted or offset by the increase in the total use of energy and
material. For example, the gain made by leapfrogging into effective energy technologies
has a potential to lead to a reduced energy cost that can simulate increased energy
consumption. In the long run, this poses the same challenge of over-consumption in
Africa as in other countries in the North.
7 Creating enabling conditions for
leapfrogging
In the effort of turning around the challenges into opportunities, it is crucial to identify
enabling conditions that make leapfrogging landing into a higher plateau of success rather
than stepping into a muddy pond of failure. These enabling conditions define the landing
platform so that all the leapfrogging exercise does not derail the most pressing issue of
poverty alleviation and meeting basic needs. They also create an inclusive socioeconomic
development for the majority of the African population. With the view of the
foregoing challenges, the conditions that facilitate possible leapfrogging in Africa are
briefly outlined as follows under four clusters namely, political and institutional cluster;
infrastructural cluster; development context and cooperation cluster; and instrumental
cluster.
7.1 Political and Institutional Cluster
Government policies, education as well as institutional capacity building are included
under this cluster.
7.1.1 Government policies
Governments have the role of providing policies on science and technology as well as on
SCP to enhance the shift to sustainability. In Brazil, the success story of ethanol
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