Public Event: Cooperative Research, Evidence-Based Policy: The Global South Enabling its Just Transition

Where: Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, San Joaquín Campus, School of Engineering, Room A2, Av. Vicuña Mackenna 4860, Macul, Santiago, Chile

Where: Online

The Global South is not merely a recipient of climate change and energy transition challenges; it is also a generator of solutions.

In this public event, researchers from across the Global South and key decision-makers from Chile’s public and private sectors will showcase their experiences integrating technical research and public policy to produce concrete results, and open a dialogue on what is needed to better connect cooperative research with policy across the Global South.

The seminar will:

• illustrate how integrating technical research and public policy yields tangible results in energy planning and policy design.
• discuss how to strengthen and scale the mechanisms connecting rigorous technical research with the design and implementation of just transition policy.

If you’re in Santiago for the International Association of Energy Economics conference please come along in person on 23 July to the event, which includes a Q&A session with the audience, and concludes with a reception to connect and build relationships with researchers and policy makers from the Global South.

If you’re elsewhere in the world, please join us online. The session will be in English.

Speakers:

• Ministry of Energy, María José García, PMI Chile Project Manager
• Ministry of Economy, Nicolás Cerón, Policy and Institutional Analyst, Sustainable Productive Development Division
• CLG-Chile, Matías Cáceres, Public Policy Advisor at Business Leaders for Climate Action

Drawing on RESET’s core strengths, frontier economic and policy analysis, open-source modeling tools, and locally led research, this conversation features a panel of experts, centering Global South voices. 

Panelists:

• Balachandra Patil, Investigador Principal, Divecha Centre for Climate Change, Indian Institute of Science
• Tarun Sharma, Associate Professor, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee
• Manuel Portilla, Consultant Analyst, Vinken
• Moderated by Juan Pablo Montero, Professor of Economics, PUC and member of the RESET Advisory Group

Background

Just energy transition is a global challenge whose solution depends, critically, on what happens in the Global South. Developing countries account for a disproportionate share of future emissions and decarbonization potential, yet receive barely 20% of global clean energy investment. This gap is not only financial: part of the challenge lies in connecting local research and analytical capacities, which incorporate the realities and specificities of the Global South, with the spaces where decisions are made, in a binding, fluid, and timely way. 

Faced with this scenario, the Global South is not merely a recipient of challenges; it is also a generator of solutions. Across Asia, Latin America, and Africa, researchers and decision-makers are developing context-adapted responses: energy planning models, evidence-based policy proposals that include carbon pricing mechanisms built from local evidence, just transition strategies for labor markets, and cooperation instruments that open concrete pathways toward decarbonization. Yet these experiences do not always manage to engage with one another, a fragmentation that dilutes their collective reach, nor do they consistently find real channels of influence in the processes where the policies that could scale them are defined. 

RESET (Research for South-led Energy Solutions and Transitions) works precisely at that intersection. It is an international network of researchers and decision-makers from the Global South, coordinated by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), that seeks to accelerate just energy transitions adapted to each country’s local realities. Its work is structured around three integrated pillars: the development of evidence-based policy solutions, including carbon pricing mechanisms, climate finance, and just labor transitions; energy modeling through open-source models adapted to national contexts, focused on ensuring that countries themselves have ownership and control over their own energy planning; and the evaluation of existing policies to identify how their design and implementation can be improved. What connects the three pillars is direct engagement with decision-makers and the building of local research capacities. 

This event brings together in Santiago RESET members from across the Global South alongside key actors from Chile’s public and private sectors, to open a dialogue that places these experiences in value, using the Chilean context as a space for discussion and as a concrete illustration of the challenges and advances shared across the region. 

Reference case: Dominican Republic 

The MCET Chile team, in collaboration with EDF, worked with the Dominican Republic’s Ministry of Energy and Mines to develop the analysis scenarios for evaluating carbon market mechanisms in the electricity sector, using the open-source SWITCH model. The World Bank validated RESET’s work by incorporating the scenarios into its own evaluation, and subsequently contracted MCET Chile to replicate the exercise in Chile, in direct collaboration with Chile’s Ministry of Energy. Co-benefits: the model was made available to the Dominican Ministry, and the National Energy Commission’s planning team received direct capacity-building. A concrete example of methodological rigor, transparent South-South collaboration, and capacity development.