SWITCH-Asia hosts workshop at APRSCP

Strong interest in SWITCH -Asia Event: “Engaging Business in SCP ”

Participants at the Asian Pacific Round Table on Sustainable Consumption and production (APRSCP) showed a strong interest in the SWITCH-Asia as nearly one third of all participants attended the SWITCH-Asia session. Experts, policy-makers and practitioners from Sri Lanka and from all over Asia, took part in this crosslearning opportunity.

The objective of the SWITCH-Asia participation in the 9th APRSCP was to develop a closer cooperation with stakeholders in the APRSCP network, to exchange best practices, and to coordinate future events for demonstration and replication of SCP; hereby enhancing the overall impact of the SWITCH-Asia programme.

Engaging SMEs and consumer organizations in SCP

Engaging SMEs and consumer organizations in SCP is the main thrust of the SWITCH-Asia projects. The mini-roundtable directly addressed the conference theme of the 9th APRSCP, which was:  SCP, a  strategy to meet; global challenges in business and industry. Four SWITCH-Asia projects made a short presentation on their approach in engaging businesses:

 

• The Train the Trainers Project in China presented how they are training decision-makers in the construction industry in designing and building more energy efficient buildings, and how to reduce the environmental impact during the construction process.
• The Pro-poor Bamboo Production Supply Chains project in China presented how they are developing a market, where bamboo products can be used as a sustainable construction material in the reconstruction of the Sichuan province, but with potential for wider replication.
• The Mainstreaming Energy Efficiency through Innovative Business Support (MEET-BIS) project in Vietnam presented how the project creates an effective linkage among technical service providers, SMEs, and financial institutions.
• The environmental performance of key export sectors in Sri Lanka project (EEPex) explained how a sector approach and strong stakeholder participation is key in obtaining a large outreach to export companies.

 

Research on replication shows first results

The SWITCH-Asia programme shared important progress of the ongoing studies to find successful and efficient replication mechanisms for SCP practices.  “Replication” is an important step for SCP, as it is for development work and projects in general. Small businesses and associated organisations can learn and adapt, making themselves more efficient and having less impact on the natural environment; but to have sweeping change across sectors and indeed whole industries, it is important to replicate such successful small changes. No replication, no large-scale change. Four SWITCH-Asia projects therefore presented their activities and approaches. Alberic Pater works for the SWITCH-Asia project “Mainstreaming Energy Efficiency Business Innovation Support” in Vietnam. He talked about replication according to his own project experience: “The main ingredients for replication are showing good results and communicating the good results. I see a lot of interest [in replication], also by financial institutions.”

Projects share their individual replication mechanism

The SWITCH-Asia research on replication mechanism thus will not only serve SWITCH-Asia projects. The success factors, however, differ from project to project. Although each project can have its own approach the workshop showed that in the context of service providers replication means creating sufficient capacity so that SCP services will also be available after a project ends. Working with service providers is therefore the natural and necessary first step for reaching a much larger number of SMEs. Gerhard Weihs, expert with the SWITCH-Asia programme confirmed: “Service providers can play the role of speaking tubes to reach out to the private sector.” Service providers are important intermediaries to reach all actors along the supply chain that have potential for scaling-out SCP. 

For more information download the presentation of the session at the right section of this page.

If you wish to read a report on the ARSCP acitivites by the SWITCH-Asia Programme please click here.