The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2017

32 JULY-AUGUST 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL A foreign affairs practitioner offers a ground-level guide to changing the world, one clean energy market at a time. Jason Donovan directs the State Department’s Office of Multilateral and Global Affairs. During 18 years in the Foreign Service, he has served in Guatemala, Italy, Malaysia, India and Washington, D.C. The views expressed here are the author’s and not necessarily those of the U.S. government. I imagine just about every reader of The Foreign Service Journal has a personal conception of diplomacy. Over 18 years in the Foreign Service, I’ve come to see it as a process that begins with respecting the aspirations of nations on their own terms, visualizes where they could go in partnership with the United States and then mobilizes them toward realizing that vision. To illustrate this process, I’d like to offer an example from the Economic Section of Embassy New Delhi, where from 2009 to 2012 I was responsible for the bilateral energy portfolio. India has 1.3 billion people, some 400 million of whom lack any source of electricity. Hundreds of millions more have only sporadic access to energy. In 2009 the country’s objective was first and foremost to increase energy production and access, and only secondarily to maximize energy efficiency and clean energy use. Could India leapfrog over the dirtiest forms of energy to meet a significant part of its vast energy needs using clean sources? From the United States’ vantage point, clean energy repre- sented one of the new Obama administration’s top three policy priorities. The idea was to push the envelope in developing cost-effective clean energy, while capitalizing on the boom in natural gas as a bridge fuel frommore- to less-polluting forms of power generation. Could Washington’s pursuit of a clean energy economy also help secure low-carbon, sustainable economic growth for partners like India? To chart the confluence of these distinct aspirations and catalyze efforts to realize them, in 2009 New Delhi and Washing- ton worked together to create the Partnership to Advance Clean Energy. Over the past eight years, PACE has helped create a $4 billion bilateral clean energy market and facilitated multifaceted cooperation in developing clean energy and fighting climate change. Establishing Ground Rules for Collaboration Within the broader context of the ongoing U.S.-India strategic dialogue, Embassy New Delhi worked closely with host-country contacts to design a framework for cooperation on clean energy and climate change. While that framework built on a number of existing, small-scale technical assistance projects, it also reflected the new administration’s call for a far more ambitious clean energy agenda. With that in mind, we negotiated a bilateral memorandum of understanding that became one of five pillars of the overall U.S.- BY JASON DONOVAN THE PATH TO PACE How U.S. Diplomacy Accelerated Clean Energy Cooperation with India FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENTAL DIPLOMACY