Title of Talk: After Transfer: Retheorising Technology for the Green Transition

Abstract: In an age of climatic change, industrial transformation, and renewed great power rivalry, technology transfer has been argued to represent a ‘new battleground’ for international law. International institutions, frameworks and actors have recognised a need for more equal distribution of ‘green technologies’, while efforts both to promote transfer and to restructure technological development have been core to the demands of many states in the Global South. Yet international lawyers have remained critical of forms of transfer that favour technological solutions and deepened extraction over comprehensive decarbonisation as a means of addressing the climate crisis. In this talk, I revisit previous efforts to draft international laws for technology, focusing on the drafting of the Code of Conduct on the Transfer of Technology (1978–85) and the writings of legal scholars during the postwar period of decolonisation, bringing them into conversation with work by historians of technology. I draw out a persistent tension in this drafting between treating technology as object or as structure, and show how this tension matters for thinking about the ecological and extractive dimensions of technological change. I suggest that retrieving these past theorisations of technology can assist in reframing debates on technology transfer, ‘green technologies’, and the deepening of the climate crisis.